The right blend

I don’t even know why I decided to snowjob poor Aleksei like that. I think I spent too much time around the twins. Those guys were a bad influence.

I was in a weird mood anyway. I had been riding high on all the change I’d been able to do, those last few days at Mike’s. Undoing giantification. Opening everyone’s eyes to the power inside them. Joining bodies with Zac. Giving the platinum-haired QB a perfect little twink body he could share with his other half… which had ended up being two perfect little twink bodies.

So much had happened I couldn’t even keep track of it all. I was still gobsmacked at the fact that we’d actually twinned my brother. Sort of. One of them actually had my old body now, but that was a lot less intense than the fact that there were now two Mikes mooching around the family manse, running the pizza biz, having lots of sex with crazy-hot guys (themselves included), doing a buttload of pot, and basically… living their best life. I was a little envious of big bro, to be honest, not least because it was my mutant mj that made it possible. I’d never altered my own reality like that.

My early discoveries linking the properties of cannabis to little-understood action centers in the brain had drawn me into a tunnel-vision life of experimentation and development. The business wasn’t even my real passion—the Hashery was mostly a means to funding my trials and refinements. All those years I’d been laser-focused on crafting and refining various specialty-strain cannabis sub-breeds, ending with what was at present a core cohort of fourteen high-intensity targeted strains focused on specific transformation loci.

I’d done everything I could to build solid data on the intricate workings of my clandestine strains. I’d carefully calibrated my own nightly tokes with low-dosage blends of this strain and that, mixed with my ordinary breads-and-butter brands of high-quality weed. I’d slipped a bit of various select ultraweed varieties into random packages of the famous high-quality wares we sold to the public, and charted the results as best I could. Gradually, too, I’d acquired a few clandestine private customers whom I supplied with cautiously blended versions of my secret red-pack strains. All of it as a way of understanding and improving just what I was capable of doing with my increasingly powerful hardcore ultraweed.

And it all went exactly to plan. I’d gradually accreted an ever-growing community of buffer, taller, extra-stoned customers, not to mention an enhanced version of my own previously unremarkable bod. And then… what? Did I enjoy the eye candy? Take advantage of the flirting and the guys draping their arms around me left, right, and center? Naw. I crunched the numbers and grinned at all the freaky hexagons I got to draw as I mapped out the stranger and stranger chemical structures of my amazing, evolving bodyshaping pot. I got my (increasingly unwieldy and usually ignored) hardons at the desk in my lab, and it wasn’t from ogling the Hashery Fanboys PicThread feed. Anyone else would have been boning just from all the cocky guys posting selfies with their dopey grins and their broccoli bags and their sleeveless tees showing off their bronzed and brazen bicep peaks; but all I saw as I scrolled my feed, and collected my testimonial letters and emails and all the come-ons I got in person from guys who’d unknowingly tweaked themselves along with their brains, was numbers. Numbers, and matrices, and the intoxicating potential to refine what each strain could do even further, to the point of almost surgical precision.

Who’d have guessed—leveling up and intensifying my drug of choice… was my actual, high-inducing, perspective-shrinking drug of choice.

I’d been sending a ton of the stuff to my laid-back pothead of a big brother, under the heading of gratitude for introducing me to the stuff way back when and thereby starting me down the path of success. Truth was, I just wanted to see what he would do with it. He’d always been a steady hash user and the epitome of chill and relaxed, but the fact that he hadn’t originally planned to end up the family pizza scion and wasn’t completely happy in that role added just that touch of frisson to his placid existence needed to catalyze an unconscious motivation for change. I send him the special stuff along with the regular, and dropped a few hints that with regular use the premium varieties might gradually induce certain kinds of… masculine improvements. My Mike-savvy told me he’d probably keep on with the regular stuff himself and instead sneakily try out the growth-catalyzing strains on hot college guys he was too shy and passive to actually go after. So I’d gone ahead and secretly made sure the “regular” batches weren’t quite as mundane as he thought they were.

Then I’d shown up for the Independence Day weekend, and it was like walking into a literal fantasy. A muscle-growth Shangri-La. Between Mike’s dosing of certain of his employees, their own shenanigans as they got wise and started spreading the growth to their friends, and Mike himself building up an increasingly strong extrasensory nexus between them, I’d stumbled into a dream sequence where everybody was an impossibly hot, insatiably stoned-’n’-horny muscle giant—except with all kinds of fascinating variations according to temperament and appeal, from the just-for-fun gorilla arms on the hairiest of the beasts to the cute redhead who’d gleefully shrunk instead of growing. Big bro was at the center of it, calm and a bit confused as he worked out what was going on and more turned on than anyone.

For me looking up at these giant dudes was the most literal heads up you could get. For ages I’d been obsessing with the mechanics of slow, incremental improvements, but seeing someone take those masculine enhancements from minute to mind-blowing was a lightning strike to the brain. I’d been driving like somebody’s grandad, and Mike and his buds had taken this Maserati and floored it, with me agape in the back seat wondering if I even knew what a car was for.

I hadn’t even been savoring my own carefully modulated improvements, much less the slow, infinitesimal beefening I’d incited to varying degrees in my customers and employees. And here were there guys turning their amps up to fourteen, outgrowing all possible clothes, laughing like muscle-hunk satyrs and spraying each other with more hot, spiky-smelling cum from their enormous hard cocks than the U.S. Navy could spatter the sides of their ships with in a decade.

(Note to self: investigate infiltration of special-strain high-fiber “herbal seasonings” into the Navy food supply.)

Then came the end of the trip and that escalating climax of transformations, of a kind and magnitude I’d barely imagined was even possible. Not only had I accidentally twinned my own brother, but I’d ended up driving home in the sleek, upsized, hunkified body of a guy I’d just met named Zac (while the extra Mike tooled around in mine). It was a completely revised existence with the barest connection to anything I know, from the neck-tickling, forearm-thick erection, to the pair of very real German shepherd ears Zac and I had received as a jocular lesson in humility, to the dizzying memories of sharing bodies and raw, easy lust and off-the-charts mutual pleasure that I still couldn’t shake because they were still constantly blowing my mind every time I thought about them.

I’d pointed my truck toward home in a kind of daze. I had a dim idea I’d eventually need to reshape this body so it would look more like the Thad Loukanis everyone expected to see (and who had at least two cameo-shot-driven PicThread fan accounts that I knew of). Reshaping was a thing—heck, the last thing I’d seen as I put Mike’s town in my rear-view was a couple morphing themselves into perfect replicas of each other—and I’d been part all of the size-management and reconfigs that had filled the last day or so of my visit. So that would have to be the plan, at some point. But as I drove buck naked across the prairies of middle America, a corded brown arm I was already getting used to out the window of my truck, dog-ears twitching in the wind and a steel-hard dick the size of Florida tapping wetly at the notch in my collarbone, I knew I wasn’t ready to give up this body just yet. I had just had an awakening, and though I hadn’t meant to end up looking like the ultimate version of a certain star quarterback’s eager, stat-loving, and occasionally mischievous boyfriend, the body I had now was absolutely symptomatic of everything I hadn’t been doing with my ingenuity, and everything I hoped to try and experience from this point forward.

I’d taken my first metaphorical group swim back in Mike’s own private Brigadoon, and on my way home I decided to try a solo lap or two during my Kansas stopover, just to get a taste for what it would be like to be… like this. The stopover was happening regardless. Though I’d gotten a reasonably early start, at least for someone who’d been sated to insensibility the night before on a heady mix of climax and impossible transformation, I’d decided early on I’d break the trip into two legs and get a hotel for the night somewhere along the way.

So it was that as the sun set in Kansas I pulled off the highway more or less randomly at an exit that promised the requisite food and lodging. It wasn’t until I was decelerating around the gentle curve of the exit ramp and caught sight of the friendly-looking lights of the Snooz-Away Motel just a few hundred feet down State Road 43 from the stop-sign intersection ahead of me that I realized I had a problem—a very, very big problem. Walking into the office in my current state was not a reasonable possibility.

I slowed, then, stuck for options—there being no other amenities in sight beyond the aforementioned cozy accommodations, the gas station next door, and the Burger Jack across the empty two-lane by-road—I found myself pulling off clandestinely right behind a shrub-footed billboard just off the exit ramp and into a secluded little arbor obviously intended for more law-enforcement-oriented pursuits. There, as the gathering dusk settled around me, I set about making myself reasonably presentable through the delicious expedient of delivering unto myself a most epic orgasm ever produced by means of hands, mouth, and tongue.

And then another one, because it seemed my libido was so high in this body that jizzing copiously down my own throat once to the point of nearly choking on my own cum and orgasming so spectacularly I saw gods and demons applauding was not enough to make this damn, majestic, arm-sized dick go down.

Finally, after the third go, I was… well, not so much “soft” as pliable enough I could probably manage to stuff my wang down a pair of pants. It would have to do, I thought with a grin. I dug in the canvas duffel of clothes the twins had left with me and found, in addition to a few interesting items I’d definitely return to later, a very loose pair of heavy-weave jeans; a sturdy pair of boots; thick socks; and the green ball cap I’d been wearing before I left to hide my one truly inexplicable set of transformations. I pulled all of these on in the truck, every article of clothing feeling, in my present multi-mega-afterglow state, like a grudging but very funny concession to dumb societal rules that didn’t seem to quite apply to me anymore.

There were a few tee shirts in the bag, too, but there I drew the line. The no-shirts rule had been infused in me, maybe literally, during my brief stay at Mike’s. In the end I zipped up the duffel and started up the truck for the short trip to the motel without even seriously considering covering up more than halfway.

The matronly but not unattractive middle-aged lady behind the desk in the motel office barely looked up from her phone long enough to check me in. I had to register under my real name, since the only ID I had said Thaddeus Loukanis on it, and thank goodness she didn’t notice or query the disconnect between the photo and what I actually looked like at the moment. The soccer jock in the yellow uniform smock manning the register at the Burger Jack, though—man, did his eyes bug out. I’d always thought it was just an expression, but I not only saw all the whites of his eyes, I practically saw the sockets behind them, too.

I listened to him softly panting as he keyed in my order, which took a while because after a day of driving and all those cumfests behind the billboard I was hungry as fuck. I needed greasy, salty, delicious beef, and not just the metaphorical kind.

The smock had a nametag that just said “Bill” on it, and I took a chance that was his name. “Thanks for feeding me, Bill,” I said, trying for mildly suggestive without making a big deal about it. Not that I needed to do much. I dunno whether it was the power of my physical attractiveness in Zac’s augmented body, or some kind of pheromones I was physically emitting, or maybe extra-sensory fuck-waves I was putting out there from the mental change centers my superweed had awakened in me, Mike, and the rest of the gang—but I knew this guy was hard for me. He aching for it, and he was riding so close to the edge being this near to me he’d probably jizz in his pants if I so much as licked my lips at him.

He kept his eyes on the register, but his breathing got a bit rougher. “My pleasure,” he said quietly as he finished ringing me up. He gave me my total and I paid, and then he went back and started some fries and went about making the rest of my food. I looked around. No customers, and no other employees. Apart from Phoebe over at the Snooz-Away Bill and I might be the only people on Earth at the moment, and I was willing to believe the laconic, Reddit-addicted desk clerk had silently receded right back into the black never-never she’d momentarily surfaced from when I’d first stepped into the motel office.

I returned my attention to my new friend. “We alone here, Bill?” I said, raising my voice just enough to carry back to him.

He glanced furtively up at me as he assembled my first double cheeseburger. “Yep,” he said.

I nodded. “Why don’t you make that to go,” I suggested, as bland as can be.

Bill nodded jerkily and started making my burgers slightly faster.

A few minutes later Bill was walking with me from the temporarily closed Burger Jack back to the motel, eyes straight ahead lest they sneak one glance too many and end the show before it began. He was taller than I expected—I was used to towering over people, having crept my height up to nearly 6-foot-7 by the time I’d driven out to Mike’s, and my Zac 3000 bod wasn’t that much shorter; but Bill had to be over six feet himself, and built very much like a small-college athlete. Once inside my room I set down my big bag of food, made sure the door was locked and my cap was in place, then turned to my lusty admirer and winked. “All yours, bud,” I said, spreading my hands at my hips.

Bill shivered, staring hard at my torso and my legs and especially what was shoved inelegantly down my jeans. He dropped to his knees and then, to my amazement, as if this were a process reserved only for the most elect of fellatees, he set about unbuttoning, unzipping, and pulling down my jeans with only his teeth.

I was amused and impressed, and the sight of him denuding me in such a singular way was enough to get my monster wang and huge cue-ball nuts going all over again. The second he got my pants down far enough my thing leapt up and practically slapped him in the face. We both watched in awe as it rose to its full, ridiculous hardness, until the damp, red, nearly-fist-sized head was nuzzling against the top of my sternum like that was where cocks were supposed to go.

Dazed, Bill got to his feet, it being more than obvious this was one blow-job that could not be delivered from the usual classic position.

Maybe blow-job isn’t the right word, anyway. The implication of getting sucked off is just that—taking a guy’s hard prick into your mouth and using all your internal oral resources to deliver the maximum of dreamy pleasures possible in there. My dick? Only a dude as big as a room could deep-throat a cock like this (as I knew from actual experience). But Bill wasn’t daunted. He deftly used his lips, his mouth, his tongue, and his hands to deliver as much pleasure as he could manage to every square inch of my enormous dick, and my suddenly slutty and oversensitive system had me moaning wantonly from the sheer awesomeness of multiple forms of stimulation at once.

Urgency started building in me and I bent to help him, while at the same time letting him know he was still the maestro in charge of making me shoot my massive, gargantuan load. He responded with even greater fervor, while maintaining his attentiveness and his constantly shifting, multi-prong attack.

“Yeah, dude,” I rasped loudly as I helped him lick around the upper reaches of my shaft. Fuck, he needs more tongue, I thought. Either that, or I need less cock! In that moment the very idea was ludicrous. Then Bill set me on fire with a long, wet, undulating lick from balls to crown.

“Yeah! Fuck, yeah!” I crooned. “Bill, man, I am so close.” At the sound of his name on my sloppy, lust-hungry lips he whimpered against the flesh of my hot, too-big prick. With one hand he fumbled at his own pants and pulled out a long, thin, uncut cock and started jerking like mad.

That did it. The flood was coming! “Get ready,” I warned him, and then I was gushing cum like Mentos dropped in a two-liter of Diet Coke. At first we tried drinking it, but the pressure and quantity was so strong that Bill had to hurriedly step back to keep from getting his uniform soaked.

We panted at each other for a long time as I finished cumming, until both of us were staring at my barely-softened, still towering cock and the huge mess I’d made all over myself, Bill’s face, and the motel’s cheap crimson-and-gold industrial shag carpet, the synthetic fibers of which weren’t even trying to absorb the puddles of goopy white spunk. Then our eyes met, and Bill grinned such a big, goofy, cum-smeared grin I had to laugh.

My burger knight returned to his fast food purgatory not long after, but I got in a jizzy kiss before he cleaned up and left. I got naked, ate my food in comfortable silence, and got in bed and put on the TV for a while to wind down, my dick eventually flopping heavily across my thigh like it knew it had to rest at least some of the time. As I half-watched a John Oliver rerun I found myself idly fondling one of my doggo-ears. I should get rid of these guys, at least, I thought. Maybe I wanted to hold onto my new ride for a bit longer, at least until I got closer to Colorado Springs, but the ears, while awesome, were even more freakish than the cock and the ability to turn hormonal college jocks into panting sybarites.

I closed my eyes and focused. I knew what I needed to do and exactly how to concentrate. Using all of my mental assiduousness, I directed my doggie ears to go back to where they came from.

Nothing happened.

I tried harder, screwing my mental acuity up to the maximum. I kept at it until I started getting a headache, then slumped back against the padded headboard. I reached up to feel, but I already knew what my fingers would find: soft, pointy, black-and-gold-furred skin and cartilage. I hadn’t been able to alter a single atom of my strangest and most interesting augmentation.

A welter of explanations occurred to me one after the other, all easily discarded. It wasn’t because Bran had given to me and so he had to undo them. This wasn’t freaking Bewitched, and the ears didn’t have DRM encoding. I should be able to alter my body regardless of how it had gotten that way, just as I’d helped alter Jay and Zac and the twins, just as Jay and Zac had altered each other until they looked exactly the same. It wasn’t because I was tired, either—hell, with this body and the energy levels I felt all the time I could run a mile right now now, no sweat. Probably literally.

It was easy to sweep aside all the false answers to my failure to morph, because deep down I knew what it really was. The special mind-awakening cannabis I’d bred, the stuff I’d slipped to Mike in concentrated doses and blended into the rest of the various strains of growth-inducing weed he’d passed on to with his friends, was true to the nature of pot itself: it was meant to be shared. My ultrapot created not isolates but a community. We’d all seen it and experienced it, as nodes emerging from a fog, connecting every man in that house to each other, myself included.

The abilities my stuff sparked in the mind weren’t singular but communal. The bottom line was that I hadn’t changed anyone those last couple of days in Muscle Shangri-La. It was always a we. The changes had come about through potent mental connections between two or more awakened men.

The conclusion was equally clear. Without the ability to totally share the experience, short of driving all the way back to Mike’s with my (metaphorical) tail between my legs I was stuck looking exactly as I was.

The unexpected feeling of powerlessness the situation left me with had me mentally disconnected for most of the rest of the next day. The remainder of the trip through Kansas and eastern Colorado was a blur. I got gas; I might have eaten. I have a vague sense of maybe making a trucker standing at the next urinal to me in some rest stop or other involuntarily, cum-spittingly hard. I dunno.

The heavy, black storm on the horizon I’d been driving toward for hours finally broke all around me at some point, but I don’t really remember. I was a blank.

As I left the interstate and started winding through the storm-drenched main streets of Colorado Springs, though, I finally started to resurface. I was master of this situation. I hadn’t just grown this weed—I had fucking engineered it. I could get back my ability to change myself. I could be Thad-that-was, or a canine-feature-free Zac-Thad, or a guy with a Thad head for work and a Zac head for fun, or… whatever the hell I wanted.

I just need to map out the right methodology to make that happen, I mused as I drove through the pelting rain toward the Hashery. Developing a new strain that would stimulate a solitary morph control was… feasible? I was pretty sure? But it would definitely take time, if it was possible at all. The easier solution by far would be to awaken someone else. Someone I liked and trusted.

It’s an embarrassing testament to how distracted I was, by my plight and my recent experiences, that the identity of my very own Mr. Liked and Trusted didn’t reveal itself to me until I actually stumbled sopping wet into my own store and the clever, fit, extremely capable and generally adorable Russian gentleman in question was very uncharacteristically using his own thick tee shirt to blot my wet, glistening torso. Then he straightened, pulling his long hair back behind his ear and staring into my eyes with real desire like he’d just discovered the very concept of infatuation, and as we sat down together on the sturdy bench by the door I remembered two very important things.

The first was that Aleksei didn’t actually like me very much.

The second was that, at the moment, I didn’t look even the slightest bit like me.

I smiled at him, and saw his nascent, if unaccustomed, willingness directed toward the stranger he perceived at yet subconsciously almost knew. This was it. He and I could definitely be the “we” I needed. I just had to mix up a bit of very special weed, share an intimate toke or two, and then my besotted young colleague could be just… like… me.

We entered the house, Rex leading the way despite his claims not to remember how to get around in his ex-lover’s place. I followed, stomach fluttering as I crossed the threshold from the shadows of the stubby intervening foyer between shop and house into the dark, still kitchen at the back of Thad’s open-plan, simply-furnished abode. It was like my internal alarms were almost but not quite going off, the way a tea-kettle starts to hesitantly whimper a bit before shrieking its guts out.

I kept telling myself I was being silly. You’ve been in here hundreds of times, I admonished my skittish psyche, and so has he, probably. You’re not doing anything wrong. It didn’t work, though. I wasn’t calmed, because the problem wasn’t that I was sneaking into Thad’s house while he was out of town somewhere, having fun with his pizza-purveying brother. It was the guy with the long, broad back and amazing, wet-denim-hugged ass I was currently following up Thad’s broad, sturdy cherry-wood center-of-house stairs the way you trailed after a hook-up who’s brought you home to his cozy boudoir and his king-sized bed and his The Weeknd playlist and his drawerful of condoms, flavored lubes, and the toys he’s set aside just for guestplay. It was that existential premonition, like a leak from another universe—the feeling that was telling me the steps I was taking right now, at this very moment, were leading me into an altered existence from which I could never return.

For some reason, my big, hard, messy tool liked that idea a lot.

I’d finally gotten to adjust and straighten out my troublemaking cock the moment Rex had turned his beautiful bronze-brown rain-dappled back on me, revealing the drops and rivulets neither of us had swabbed clear of his exquisitely smooth skin, and ever since then it had been throbbing with thick desire, trying to push through my pants like a big, fat divining rod toward Rex’s hard, round glutes and the hints of the sweet, spelunkable crevice between offered by those wet, low-hanging jeans. My dick wanted him, rubbing wetly and impatiently against my pants like a dog wanting out, and my brain and libido wasn’t far behind. Everything about Rex drew me to him, pulling at my hands and mouth and skin as fervently as it did my raging cock. The suddenness and utter totality of my smoldering lust for this intoxicating stranger was itself alarming—but my panting erection and heavy, hot, churning balls didn’t care much about that, either.

I’d kissed him! I’d touched him, drowned his smile and his sultry voice, demanded he keep his mutant doggo ears, and then… I’d kissed him. This guy—he was a stranger. Just a random guy. Except obviously not. There was nothing random or mundane about Rex. Which isn’t even his real name, I told myself frantically. How was he having such an effect on me? Was he doing this to me, maybe unconsciously, like a low-band radio wave that his body broadcast straight into mine?

Or maybe Rex was just the dream guy I hadn’t known I’d been looking for. Was this… kismet, or something? Love at first sight?

I snorted derisively at myself. This was not love. My slavering, steel-hard dick was not in love. Carnal devotion at first sight, maybe, but definitely not love. My heart pounded in my ears like it wanted to tacitly undermine my certainty on that score, drowning out the muffled chaos of the worsening storm outside.

We gained the top floor, and Rex headed unerringly for Thad’s bedroom and the gleaming en-suite. Proof, if I still needed it, that Rex had been here before—that Rex had been, at some point, a part of Thad’s life. I stopped myself awkwardly before I followed him in, realizing a bit too late that I hadn’t needed to dog the guy’s heels all the way into the damn shower cubicle. Instead I hung back in the spartan, neatly appointed bedroom and listened pathetically as he turned on the water. He hadn’t closed the door. Invitation, or supreme self-confidence?

I could peek. Just real quick. Just to see him naked in his perfectly sculpted splendor, like… appreciating Michelangelo’s David, rendered in vivid, moving sepia, every shifting muscle radiant with life and strength. And then there was the thing that was unlike any classical sculpture. If I peeked, I could verify the promise of that impossible tubular bulge down the leg of those sopping wet jeans as I drank him in…

I clenched my fists. This wasn’t me. I still couldn’t believe I’d kissed him. If I surrendered myself, I would be the reckless one. Years of showing up my foolhardy brothers held me back at the very brink. I had impulse control. I had a brain that I valued more than the abnormally intense passions that governed my family and led them monthly into one ridiculous situation after another. My dick throbbed, but I was in charge, not him.

I let out a breath and looked around Thad’s room. Characteristically, he’d left the place magazine-photo-shoot clean and tidy so he could return to a welcoming space after his trip. The bed was made with a simple navy duvet and crisp-looking lavender sheets, the dark blue carpet was vacuumed, and the surface of the long, low twelve-drawer solid oak bureau was clean and almost entirely unencumbered apart from a small lamp and an empty bone-white change dish on the end near the door.

I should make myself useful, at least, I thought. Discarding the stray thought that “uses” might be found for, say, my very eager mouth, I turned to the bureau, looking for clothes that I could leave in the bathroom for my guest to change into after his shower.

Tucking a loose lock of hair behind my ear as I bent over the drawers, I got to work. I quickly found some underwear, then rooted through the tee shirts for the ones that wouldn’t be too bad a fit on my showering visitor. Finding a size “XL” raspberry tee (old, or left by a lover?), I set the shirt and briefs on top of the bureau, then started looking for jeans or sweats for him to wear. Rex was a bit smaller and less bulky than my thick-muscled, 6-foot-7 dreamboat of a boss, but he was plenty tall enough—inches taller than I was, maybe six-four, six-five, I’d guessed—and I figured I should be able to find something that would more or less fit.

While opening and closing drawers hoping to find stacks of neatly folded pants (ideally in various sizes, all carefully ordered and labeled, despite knowing perfectly well I was in Thad’s bedroom and not the fucking Gap), I came across a bottom drawer that was packed not with clothes but with hefty, block-like bundles of red-label Hashery weed with funny mythological names and cryptic keywords hand-lettered onto each individual bag.

I blinked at the little hoard, recognizing this a stash of the special-blend strains Thad didn’t stock in the store below, or share with the general public. The smell hit me—weird, because the bureau wasn’t airtight and I should have noticed it as soon as I came. It was powerful, stimulating and sneaky like it was designed to worm its way into you, with notes of rainforest, black pepper, iron, and musk intertwined with the purest cannabis redolence I’d ever encountered. It was like, this was cannabis unbound, a purer and more dangerous form than most people even knew existed.

I’d worked with Thad’s retail strains of weed for two years, handling it, soaking it in, checking the greenhouses, very occasionally enjoying a smoke or two. It had seeped into me over all that time, making it a part of me, even if I didn’t partake in the quantity and enthusiasm of our improbably hot and hunky regulars. I was used to the regular stuff. This was beyond, in the same way a fathomless ocean was beyond a swimming hole. This was the real stuff, potent enough to twist your fate in directions even the gods wouldn’t foresee or understand.

I considered, trying to take in what I was seeing rationally. Why was it here, anyway, and in quantity, instead of the storage lockers out back—the ones that only he had the key for? Did he toke the special stuff when he was home alone, after working with the mundane varieties all day? Or was it here to share an intimate, premium smoke with certain special visitors?

I felt a rush at that for reasons I couldn’t adequately explain, my wet, achingly hard cock flexing desperately in my pants. Here it was—the back room, as it were. The part of the business and of his life that Thad had rigorously excluded me from, and Thad… well, Thad was far away, wasn’t he?

You’re the responsible one, I reminded myself harshly. You are the responsible one.

“I see you found the good stuff,” a low, luxurious voice said from behind me. “Want to share?”

I hadn’t heard the shower shut off, but now I was acutely aware of the silence of the room, with the faint sound of the storm wailing outside reduced to muted, ambient sound effects. He was out of the shower, behind me, with his naked body all warm and wet and probably irresistible. I felt him, even before I looked. I don’t know whether it was aroma, or something more complex he was sending out into the room, but I felt his body, on the back of my neck and in my mind, as though he existed to be sensed.

I let out a shaky breath and straightened, turning slowly to face him.

He was looking down at me with burning intensity. I couldn’t hold his hot stare long. I glanced up first—his doggo ears were high and pointed, emerging from his shortish, straight black hair like they belonged there. Then I let my gaze trickle down him like the shower he’d just emerged from, taking in his handsome face fringed with a hint of dark stubble along the sharp jawlines… elegant curve of his traps and the fist-thick mass of his pecs… the ridiculously perfect cuts of his flat, chiseled eight-pack… and then…

I gulped. He wasn’t naked. This was—this was almost worse. He had tied a thirsty-looking, brilliant white bath towel around his narrow, tight waist, the way I thought only people in movies did. It hugged the flare of his waist and shapely gymnast’s thighs more wickedly than any split-sided cocktail dress had ever done on a gold-digging femme fatale, but the thing that really dried my mouth was that when it came to decency the towel was entirely moot. Because below the hem, brazenly and nonchalantly kissing the upper reaches of his left knee, was, very real and very visible, the turtlenecked, pointy, rare-steak-pink head of Rex’s impossibly enormous cock.

What would that feel like in my hands? What would it feel like to possess—to have a cock so heavy, with so many square inches of sensitive, lickable flesh… and a body, too, that had to be as utterly sensual as it was arresting? I had to know. I didn’t know how I would find out, but I had to know.

My gaze shot back up to his searing brown eyes. They were flecked with amusement even as they darkened with a hot, simmering hunger. Everything about him overwhelmed me. “How—?” I rasped, hating myself for my id-driven reactions and for my own inferior level of potency. If he touched me now I would lose it, in more ways than one, and I literally could not process whether that was a good thing or not. I don’t even know what I was trying to ask. How was he—what? So sexy? So huge? So impossibly perfect, attractive to the nth power? So in control of everything I was feeling right now, the arousal and need that felt like it was wrenching upward, more and more every second I looked at him?

I expected him to be smarmy and make a move on me. But he was utterly serious when he replied, “Like I said, Lexy… it takes a friend. A co-pilot.”

I stared hard at him. Only my friends called me Lexy, Thad included. I didn’t know this guy. I felt like I shouldn’t read too much into it—it was a fairly obvious shortening of my name—but I couldn’t expunge the lingering sense that it was some kind of clue.

It was the “co-pilot” thing that held my attention, though. I’d agreed to that, already. Maybe under the influence of Rex’s inhumanly sensual charm, but I’d agreed to it.

Silently, I nodded, once. Rex’s smile was crooked.

He directed his gaze down at the open drawer, then back up at me. “So, the question stands,” he said, moving an inch closer and putting my pants in immediate danger of soaking. “Want to share some of Thad’s special weed and… see what happens?”

There was no air on the room, but somehow, I didn’t need it. I’d given up trying to think. I nodded again, quirking my lips in a small smile. This time, Rex grinned, his perky doggo ears twitching with happiness, and… I dunno if a heart can orgasm, but that’s sure it what I felt like happened to me in that moment as my poor besotted ass smiled back up at him.

The next morning the storm had cleared, and a strangely bright, yellow-hued dawn blazed through my windows at me like the sun was reaching into my bedroom to slap me awake. I had serious morning wood—or morning sequoia in my case. The intriguing natural smell of my cockhead was almost literally right in my face along with the echoes of sweat, semen, and a whole lot of very intensive pot. My impulse was to wrap my mouth around it and bring myself to yet another orgasm, which, giving my teeming hormones lately would be mere moments in bringing about. I settled for a quick lick around the sensitive rim, because several sensations I needed to pay attention to were piling into my synapses like football players on a fumbled pigskin.

I wasn’t alone in my big, comfy bed, for one thing. The body curled up against me from behind was not only warm and strong, with a brawny arm thrown around my augmented Zac-torso under the covers, but was also possessed of a morning poker of his own that was rutting on a slow, automatic rhythm against my lower back.

Distracting me from this pleasant envelopment was something a little more unusual, though not, by this point, unfamiliar: an awareness in my mind of another consciousness, tentatively linked with my own through a gossamer connection forged through a combination of necessary and contributing factors: a few shared bowls of Eros epsilon psych-linking weed; my own familiarity with mind-nexusing thanks to my recent experiences with Mike and his aggressively connected gang; and Aleksei’s adorably transparent need, accompanied by a yearning willingness to experience a kind of intimacy with me beyond the joy my enhanced, sex-radiating body could give him.

It had definitely succeeded. Power and energy had already started flowing between us, and I could tell we were already near the point where Lexy and I could work together to, well, normalize me just a little. I was strangely uncertain about how quickly I would go back to being “Thad,” and I had to do some serious thinking about that, but I knew some things had to change.

We’d had sex, before the pot and then again after. The first time was fast and, yes, furious, and neither of us had lasted long. He was fascinated by my neck-nuzzling, super-sensitive erection, licking and stroking if feverishly like he had to account for the pleasure of every single part of it. Unlike my friend Bill from the little side-quest on the way home he didn’t let me help at all, either. Not with hands or mouth. It was all his, all the junk I possessed—the whole torso-length shaft and the grapefruit balls as well. He made me cum even faster than I could, and he was blasting uncontrollably from his own meaty ten-inch tool the moment the first gusher erupted from my gasping cockslit.

Then I’d prepared the bongs with the special shit and we smoked languidly in my bed, half hard and half satiated, like we were at halftime. He asked what I was like being irresistible and impossibly hung. Mostly I made up a bunch of guff, though I told him about my little Kansas stopover. He laughed. I asked him about his job and about himself, as a way of feeling around my own willingness to sleep with him when I had never allowed myself to indulge in what had been a long, low-simmering attraction to my intensely cute second-in-command. His answers were reassuringly in line with what I already knew, though he was cagey about his employer—conscious, perhaps that as Thad’s supposed “ex” I might be sensitive when it came to our mutual friend.

I mulled over the me-sleeping-with-Aleksei thing. I decided I had given myself the loophole that I was currently “someone else,” and so it wasn’t Thad spilling all this spunk and getting all Lexy-cozy—it was “Rex.” I was totally not fooling anyone, of course, least of all myself; but as the weed had deepened our horniness, bringing the glow of our minds in sight of each other while our ability to perceive on the nonphysical plane progressed, I had decided this was my only “pure” chance to get royally fucked by Lexy’s red-hot, titanium-hard power tool before the weed and various revelations changed everything. It had been an impulsive decision, and one not one that had come from the most exceedingly rational parts of my brain. But the pleasure of Lexy cumming inside me then, and the warm, pleasant soreness of my ass (my technically virginal ass, given I’d only possessed this body a few days) now, allowed me to effectively cast aside all regret.

As if he were dreaming about the same thing, Lexy cuddled closer behind me, nuzzling his face into my shoulder as he rocked his morning wood along my spine, and—

Huh, I didn’t remember Lexy being quite that big.

A phone buzzed on the nightstand, and I reached for it automatically. Checking the screen I saw that it was mine (Jimmy and Jase had rescued it at some point and stuck it in the bag they’d left me, along with the clothes and other goodies), all juiced up after a night on the charger. The incoming message was a text from my hot-blooded greenhouse guy and groundskeeper, Amir, asking me why the shop wasn’t open and why the fuck I wasn’t answering my messages.

I glanced to the top of the screen—shit, we’d slept in to nearly noon! That Eros stuff was some powerful weed, especially on top of a long drive and a few layers of serious afterglow. I remembered I had told Amir I’d be meeting up with him this morning to go over some plans that had been delayed by my trip. Plus I opened up the shop most days, being more of a morning person than most of my employees. For all I knew there walk-in customers milling in the gravel parking lot, wondering if they were too stoned to remember when we were supposed to be open.

“Lexy,” I said, reaching under the covers to gently shake the arm that was tossed over my flank. The arm only contracted, holding me tighter, as Lexy murmured damp, sleepy protests into my neck. “Lexy, we gotta—”

Another text came through from Amir. “Are you home? I’m coming up.” I stared, the hairs rising on my arms as I realized I was even now hearing the thump of boots on my stairs. Aleksei didn’t need to be discovered in bed with the boss, I thought hectically. Amir talked to everyone, and it would be around town in hours.

“Lexy—” I began urgently.

The door to my bedroom burst open, and there was Amir, fire-eyed and mane-haired, heroically silhouetted by the sunlit stairwell window behind him. At thirty-seven he was a picture of mature, timeless masculinity, from his heavy boots and dark, battered jeans to his thick tee-shirt betraying the expanse of wiry, dark chest hair pushing against it from within, to the bristling beard that seemed to be so endemic to him, so intrinsic to his high-testosterone character, I wasn’t sure he hadn’t been born with it.

I sat up, exposing the brown arm wrapped around me under my own. Hurriedly I moved the blanket back up to cover my huge dick, but Amir’s furious eyes were fixed on my face, not anything below. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded hotly, a hurricane of indignation. “And why are you sleeping in Thaddeus’s bed—”

Aleksei stirred behind me, drawing Amir’s attention. His jaw dropped, and he added haltingly, “—with your—your—!”

He couldn’t manage to finish the thought, so he regrouped and shouted, “Who are you?! Where is Thaddeus? Where is Aleksei?”

“I’m… here,” Aleksei said from behind me, sounding confused. Only—it did not sound like Lexy, at all.

I whipped around in bed to face him and gaped, as stunned as Amir. It was like the bed had become a mirror, one side reflecting the other. Staring into my eyes was the face I knew from the hotel mirror, the face I had received by virtue of merging most unexpectedly with one of Mike’s sexy crowd of customers and friends. Instead of the familiar, pale, angled face of the boyishly cute, long-haired right-hand man and irreplaceable stalwart of Thad’s Hashery, the visage staring back at me was the one that Aleksei knew as “Rex”—smooth honey-brown skin, short black hair, doggo ears, and all.

“What?” Aleksei said, brows furrowing.

Man. Call me narcissistic, but I was feeling that same undertow that Lexy had felt with me. Something about this body was aggressively arousal-inducing, and fuck if I didn’t want to kiss that confusion right off that gorgeous twice-stolen face.

I had felt it from him, the night before. The more stoned he got, the more into me body he was, wanting to know how it felt, what it was like. He must have one powerful mind, I thought, to seize hold of the the mutual connection so easily. Either that, or the Eros epsilon was a lot stronger than I’d thought it was. A niggling thought told me that Aleksei’s transformation could not have happened without my own help and collusion, but I ignored it. I couldn’t go there, not yet.

“No, I mean, Aleksei, who works here,” Amir said, also confused. He folded his arms over his chest, which made him look very intimidating and sexy as fuck. Maybe he wanted to be the dilfy meat in a “Rex” sandwich, I couldn’t help thinking. I could certainly see, or maybe sense, the effect we were having on him. I knew nothing of Amir’s sex life, and maybe he liked guys or maybe he didn’t, but even from across the room the two of us were doing a number on him. Our bodies, our cocks, even unseen, were riling him up under that thick, hairy skin of his, and I would bet my house that if I and Aleksei stood on either side of him, right now, our quivering pillars and touchable bodies in easy reach, he’d succumb as easily as a penguin sliding into the sea.

“Look,” Amir insisted roughly, as if he were pushing aside stray thoughts, “either tell me who you are, or I will call the police.”

He must have figured we might have a legit reason for being here or he would have done so already, I thought. “Sorry,” I said, adding pointedly. “I just woke up, so—” Amir’s lips tightened at this seizing of the offensive—he knew he was the one who’s awakened us. “I’m Rex, Thad’s ex. He got delayed at his folks’ and asked me to, um, step in. For a few days.”

Amir’s gaze flicked to Aleksei, who by now was looking down under the covers and gaping at the muscles he’d bloomed overnight—not to mention the arm-sized raging erection. My own brain was short-circuiting, but somehow the right synapses fired and I understood what Amir had seen: a hunk exactly like me, who answered to “Aleksei.” Or something that sounded like it. I turned quickly back to Amir. “This is my brother, Alex,” I added blandly.

I felt Aleksei look up sharply at that, but my attention stayed on Amir, who at the moment was busy checking out our matching doggo ears. Fair enough; if I were in his place I’d take shared, pointy German shepherd ears as a sign of being related even over literally identical faces. “He’s helping out, too,” I explained.

Amir nodded. He seemed to have gotten over the shock of seeing twin brothers sleeping together. Maybe he figured we were both so viscerally attractive we literally couldn’t help it. I could buy that, having seen this body from the inside and the outside, and having directly felt the heat of Aleksei’s desire and obsession through our nascent, if already strengthening, mental bond.

What would that be like, to grow up that way? I though, amused. My thoughts drifted back to Jimmy and Jase… but those two, with their Clark Kent specs and their irrepressible gift for fomenting chaos, were a reality unto themselves. Even without the special body-morphing weed. I smiled fondly, remembering.

Amir cleared his throat. “Well, one of you had better open the shop, and check the online orders, too,” he said curtly. “This is a business, not a fuck palace!” With that he turned and stomped out. The heavy thunk of his feet down the stairs reverberated through the house, followed shortly after by the slam of the back door leading out to the yards and greenhouses.

I stared after him for a few seconds after he had audibly left the building, then turned back to Aleksei. He had the same expression on his face—the expression that said, “Did he just say ‘This is not a fuck palace’?” All at once, we burst out laughing. Then, as we grinned at each other, still chuckling and staring into eyes that neither of us had a birthright to, we leaned in and, inevitably, kissed.