The right blend

by BRK   

In this sequel to “One Hot Summer,” Thad returns to Colorado, still in Zac’s upgraded, hyper-hung body. When he finds he’s no longer able to morph himself back into what he’s supposed to look like, his only hope is his sexy and capable second-in-command, Aleksei.

Sometimes you don’t know what your kinks are until you’re staring them in the face. And then, of course, it’s too late. Everything you thought you had figured out about what gets your motor running gets rejiggered faster than you can say Kurosaki Ichigo, and you’re left with a whole new lust apparatus with no off switch and no user’s manual or help video in sight.

Me, you’d have thought I’d have gone for my boss of two years, like practically every homo this side of the Front Range. And, sure, Thad Loukanis, owner and chief cannabis-engineer of Thad’s Hashery of Colorado Springs, Colorado, was the unquestioned epitome of hotness. The guy was a 6-foot-7 Adonis and built like a pro gymnast with souped-up genetics, and that’s just for starters. Then there was that almost stereotypical sexy-Mediterranean swarthiness to his smooth, olive complexion, punctuated with the chestnut-brown eyes and the lush wavy near-black hair he usually, though not always, kept tantalizingly short.

See, Thad was… he was too perfect for me. Not that I didn’t measure up, or that he was out of my league or anything. It was more like he was a prototype, an idealized mock-up, when what I wanted was the real thing. I wanted a connection, more than I wanted marble-hewn muscle and effortless charm. Thad never seemed to fully relax around me even after I became his number-two. There were secrets he wasn’t ready to share with anyone, even me.

He was a hell of a package, though, and his tight tee shirts, that crooked smile that popped the faintest hint of a dimple, and those sharp, bewitching bedroom eyes had all the boys swooning. It was an appreciation that translated into clicks, likes, and a whole lot of repeat business on our website and social media and a ton of in-person traffic through our retail store, too. A steady stream of guys of all ages and types made the expedition to our little out-of-town ultra-modern mart to pick up Hashery-brand varieties of weed or tour the specialty greenhouses out back… and maybe catch sight of our dreamy, even-keeled, always charming proprietor. Rain, snow, or buzzards-in-the-sky heatwave, there was always a guy or three up here at the farm wanting a taste of Thad, even if it was only the kind of morsel you got from raking your eyes over his stacked, eerily perfect physique.

A lot of these high-flying Thad groupies were worth a long look themselves, with a tendency to wide smiles, broad shoulders, outgrown shirts, and exposed socks or ankles from jeans that were maybe an inch shorter than they should have been. We had to have, on average at least, the most hunky and aesthetically admirable clientele of any business in the state, gyms included; and even the cheery, permanently-half-zonked guys that consumed our mind-altering wares on the regular seemed vaguely aware that Thad’s was where the buffest and yummiest stoners all got their mary jane.

Maybe it was just that I’d been observing our customers closely for two years, but to me it was kind of obvious if you looked at it objectively. The website and packaging on all the various publicly-sold strains never claimed anything more than strong flavor and “lasting effects,” and Thad so far hadn’t let on any more than that to me, even in private. But it didn’t take Brains from Tracy Island to make the connection that our most regular and most loyal customers were the same well-baked dudes most likely to be sporting ripped seams spreading tightly across bowling-ball delts, and hard, round muscle-butts pushing out pants they hadn’t noticed yet were getting a little too tight. Which, in turn, made the secret strains that Thad sold only privately, and that only he dealt with, that much more suspect.

So, yeah, my feelings when it came to my good-looking, bonerific, amiable but closed-mouthed and occasionally closed-off boss were, to say the least, complicated. He was a good man and a fun guy to watch a Broncos game or go white-water rafting with, but I was starting to feel a tiny, persistent buzz in the back of my head telling me that if he didn’t truly trust me, I might be better off using my business degree to help build some other home-grown business—one where I could become a real part of the story.

I was thinking about this a lot over the long Fourth of July weekend. Thad was off visiting his big brother, who I gathered ran the family pizza business out east somewhere, and I had the shop and grounds all to myself. I have to admit, the temptation was strong to go digging through the house—the shop was attached to the side of Thad’s simple but spacious two-story farmhouse, with the greenhouses behind—but my morally obsessive grandma Jo wouldn’t have stopped at rolling in her grave if I’d stooped that low looking for dirt and secrets. No, she’d have dug herself out, borrowed someone’s phone at talon-point, and posthumously sent me a long, passive-aggressively worded email spelling out just how disappointed in me she was.

Rifling through Thad’s stuff was more my brothers’ speed anyway, which, in itself, was an even better discouragement. Aleksei’s life-hack number one: anything my degenerate brothers Viktor and Vlad were willing to do was something I should run far away from. The fact that I was even thinking about digging through Thad’s files and papers was just proof of my curiosity and growing frustration with Thad’s lack of openness.

It was late Tuesday afternoon. Outside it was already dark, mostly thanks to a raging thunderstorm that had been parked over the area for hours and was still going, beating hard against the little blacktop outside and noisily shaking the building around me. I was just finishing boxing up the mail orders and was thinking of locking up early when the shop bells over the door tinkled, signaling a customer had braved the storm. I looked up, and everything just seemed to stop.

The man who entered was tall, good-looking, and extremely ripped—not chiseled and bulky like Thad and a lot of our equally generously sculpted customers, but extremely hard and defined, with a body fat so low you could count every intercostal and see the rippling of his flat, cut abs even relaxed, each smooth, firm brick broad and elegant as it gave way to the others above and below like the sandstone strata on a canyon wall. This display led irresistibly up to the firm, rounded protrusion of his meaty, modestly proportionate pecs. This was a man made to be admired, with the eyes, and then with the rest of you.

I could see all of this because from the neck down he was wearing only baggy jeans and a pair of old boots, leaving every inch of his lanky torso exposed under the soft fluorescents of the store. His skin was a warm medium brown and his straight black hair was short enough most of it was hidden under a worn green ball cap, which was the only other thing he had on that I could see.

I… couldn’t even understand my reaction. I knew he was beautiful and that I was drawn to him before I had even fully taken him in, but then he lifted his sweet, entrancing face, and our eyes meeting set off a firecracker in my chest. I actually put a hand to my sternum, as if to make sure there wasn’t a gaping hole there and everything was still where it should be.

I was facing the front of the shop and its glass windows and door. The storm outside made it look almost black, but I could see the shapes of some nearby trees bending into the wind. Lightning cracked somewhere nearby, followed by a loud roll of thunder. Belatedly I realized my newcomer was drenched—because of course he was. Even if he’d parked near the door, just the walk from his vehicle to the entrance would have gotten him soaking wet. His sleek, hairless skin was beaded with water, his cap was sodden, and his jeans were clinging to—holy fuck, that can’t be a dick half-filling his pants leg all the way to his knee, could it?

Get your act together, Aleksei. Dream bod and leg-ferret aside, this guy needed a towel. The trouble was, I didn’t have one to hand. As a kind of stopgap I pulled off my own extra-thick brick-red Hashery tee shirt as I rushed toward him from around the counter. He looked at me in surprise as I approached him and started blotting the moisture off him with my wadded-up tee. “Uh, hi to you too,” he said, his voice a smooth baritone that hit me right in the balls.

I froze, glancing up at him with an awkward smile. The guy had to be a long and limber 6-foot-5, and I had bent a little to dab at his abs (which were undulating lightly while he breathed down at me, pulling at my attention). The eyeline between us felt almost vertical. I straightened myself up and swallowed a little—the angle hadn’t much improved. My pale skin felt like it was prickling with heat, which made not sense to me. Height alone didn’t normally do it for me, but something about this guy and the vibe I was getting was pressing buttons I didn’t even know I had.

At least I didn’t have to feel too self-conscious about my own shirtlessness. I wasn’t buff like him or swole like a lot of our patrons, but I was naturally lean and fit, even without all the gym work everyone around here seemed to be doing whenever you weren’t looking. Only thing that stood out about me was my shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Everyone I knew had short hair, even this guy, and despite how proud I was of my mane I’d almost cut it off three times in the last six months.

I swallowed again. “Sorry, sir,” I said. “Is there something I can help you find?” I looked at the shirt in my hand; then, as it was now too cringey to keep wiping him down like he was a Toyota who’d pulled into my car wash, I offered him the balled-up tee. “Uh, or I could find you a towel, if you like,” I added lamely.

The man looked at me almost fondly and took the shirt. He was tired, I realized as I watched him wipe his shoulders and arms. It felt like he’d been struggling with something, exerting a lot of mental effort. Which made sense—driving through a storm this intense for any length of time was an ordeal. “Here, come, sit,” I said impulsively, guiding him to a polished walnut bench to one side of the shop floor. He sank onto it gratefully, dotting his forearms.

I sat next to him, acutely aware of a heat somehow radiating from him despite his having just been out in the cold rain. I seemed to absorb it, somehow, like he was sending off waves of warmth and beauty and lust solely for the benefit of those around him. My pulse quickened and cock started to react… which naturally got my brain veering back toward that inexplicable bulge I’d seen. What was that? Was he… wearing something underneath his jeans, like long johns or something, and they’d gotten wadded up somehow? Maybe he was smuggling some kind of illicit substance, with parcels taped to his thighs minimize the chances of discovery—though what kind of contraband was fat and tubular like that, and who he needed to hide it from, was beyond me.

I shook the distraction away and kept my attention firmly on his face. “I’m Aleksei, by the way.”

He looked up at this, as if my introducing myself was slightly unexpected. Something in his eyes seemed conflicted, though I couldn’t imagine why. “You don’t know me?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, examining his heart-stopping face again just to be sure. I allowed myself a small, abashed smile. “I’d remember if I met you before. Are you an online regular?” Maybe I was supposed to recognize his voice from phone orders, but, if so, that wasn’t ringing any bells, either.

I was having trouble thinking straight, which might have been part of the problem. This guy was just too intense to sit next to. I was trying to fight my arousal, but my cock was straining to get hard in my work trousers, and the thing was above-average enough in size that a bent, stymied half-boner trapped in the tight confines of my crotch could easy approach downright painful. My tactile senses were overwhelmed by the simple presence of his magnetic body, my olfactory apparatus could not get enough of his scent, and my field of vision was increasingly consumed with his face. I couldn’t look away. I wanted desperately to move even closer, to touch him for real with the caress of fingers and the brush of lips.

This is wrong, I thought helplessly. Unnatural…

No, not unnatural. On the contrary, it felt infinitely natural. But it wasn’t coming from me, from my nature. This lust and need was seeming into me from him.

He looked intently at me, setting my shirt aside, and I tried to focus. “Aleksei, it’s me,” he said seriously, unguarded for a single moment. “I’m Thad…’s boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.” That last part sounded oddly like a sudden swerve, like he’d inexplicably changed what he was going to say in mid-speech—not just the “ex” part, but the whole the boss’s boyfriend thing. He cleared his throat, then added diffidently, “He must have mentioned me?”

“Not… that I remember,” I said distractedly. I’d been watching a few beads of water trailing down the sides of his face and realized he was still wearing that sopping-wet ball cap. It was so soaked the green looked almost black. That won’t do, I thought. In a lightning move I reached up and pulled it off. The beautiful man’s eyes widened comically, and he reached up to stop me, a second too late. “Wait—!”

I stilled and stared, the forgotten cap in my hand dripping silently onto the floor by my feet as I gaped at two tall, pointy doggie ears twitching high and alert atop his head amidst a tumble of damp black hair. Unable to help myself, I reached up with my free hand to touch them. They had the coloring and shape of a German shepherd’s, and the skin and cartilage and short, soft fur between my fingers felt… exactly the way they looked.

The ear I was fondling twitched in my hand, and I pulled my hand back and laughed. “They’re real,” I said, reaching for them again.

“Yeah,” Thad’s supposed boyfriend said, sounding as though he had very mixed feelings about his doggo ears. “I’ve been trying to get rid of them, but…”

I had fleeting images of the poor guy going from surgeon to surgeon, all them refusing to do the operation, and I felt weirdly horrified. “Don’t,” I told him earnestly as I went back to gently playing with his doggo ears without permission.

When my gaze flicked back down I saw chestnut-brown eyes warm with affection, almost like he knew me already just from the few minutes we’d spent sitting here on his bench, both of us half-naked and him dripping with rainwater. He ducked his head slightly. “I need to look at least a little normal,” he said, almost apologetically, glancing up at me through his long lashes. “But… I discovered I can’t do it alone.”

I nodded. The not-going-it-alone thing made sense. That kind of a life-changing operation would be daunting enough even if you did have someone at your side, and to face it solo would be awful. I held his gaze, trying to convey my empathy, and as he lifted his chin to stare back at me I saw… a glint of something in his eyes, almost like he was considering me as a candidate for the person he joined forces with, if I could be adapted to that kind of role. I found this… oddly appealing, so much emotion swelled in my throat.

It was weird. Such a twist might have been impossible to conceive of under any other circumstances. I had just met this guy. We were utter strangers to each other.

But something had changed in me in the last five minutes, like the cosmic demiurge had put the world on pause for a second just to monkey around with my config settings, then started everything up again. There was Aleksei before this moment, and Aleksei after. Because I had, after twenty-six long years on this planet, finally discovered my type, my kink, and my fetish: tall, sweet, rangy, exquisitely buff, radiantly beautiful, possibly inhumanly hung, possessed of touchable dark-golden skin, mesmerizing eyes, and pert, soft, twitchy, emotionally responsive doggo ears.

It was not just that he was hot, because I knew from hot guys. I lived in a microuniverse of almost nothing but hot guys in every flavor and personality. It was the sheer extra-ness of him—the way his existence and his animus and his physical being all colored so far outside of the lines that all-new fucking lines had to be added to the thing. That was what I was a goner for.

And if that was real, that meant that my sexual and emotional fulfillment was probably pretty much down to this exact man in front of me.

“The ears stay,” I told him firmly, hand stilling behind the ear I’d been fondling. Then, my willpower shot to hell at this point, I moved in for a soft kiss.

It surprised him, I could tell. But he responded quickly, answering my gentle kiss with one of his own. Our lips parted briefly, almost reflexively, but our tongues only touched in the demurest of greetings before we pulled back from each other, basking in the unexpected moment.

I wanted to keep skritching, but I didn’t want to be a pain about it. I wasn’t quite ready to pull my hand back, though, and so I found myself stroking the back of his head instead. His hair was soft and thick, and shortish enough that this, too, or maybe it was my imagination, almost felt a bit like stroking doggo fur.

“So, you didn’t tell me your name, Thad…’s ex-boyfriend,” I said, drawing out the cryptic moniker just the way he had. I paused for effect. “Is it… Rex?” I teased.

The object of my sudden, inexplicable infatuation sighed dramatically, as if he were pretending exasperation. “Sure. You can call me Rex,” he conceded flatly.

The give took me by surprise. “Yeah?” I was conflicted. It wasn’t who he really was, but it’d be fun to call him that. Who was I to demand total truth from someone who had just met me, anyway?

He reciprocated my petting then, sliding his fingers into my mane near my left temple, sending tingles all through me. He watched me for a beat, maybe guessing what I’d been thinking. “I’ll tell you the whole story, maybe,” he said guardedly. He bit his lip in a way that made me want to kiss him again. “Right now,” he added meaningfully, “I think I need to get out of these wet clothes.”

I immediately felt bad about making him sit here flirting while he was soaked and probably uncomfortable, and pulled back a bit in embarrassment. “Right, right!” I said, jumping to my feet. I thought about the storm outside, which only seemed to be getting worse. The back of the shop and the white interior door that led into the main building were right in my line of sight, like a fait accompli. “Why don’t you clean up and get changed here, in the house?” I suggested. “I’m sure Thad wouldn’t mind.”

Rex smiled up at me. “I’ll bet.” He flicked his gaze toward the rear door and added, “I’m not sure I remember the way, though…”

There was that glint again.

I… wasn’t a player. It was out of character as fuck for me to be acting like this, and conversely I was under no illusions that Rex’s flirting meant anything more than that he was a basic horndog with extra relish. But I was stuck on him, and the fact I was stuck on him and the low-key anxious need to know why I was stuck on him meant that I wasn’t going to let this guy out of my sight. “Think of me as your copilot,” I told him, reaching out my hand to help him up.

Rex grinned widely at this. There was an in-joke there I wasn’t privy to, I was fairly sure, giving me a ghost of a reminder of my taciturn boss and his tendency not to tell me things. Either way he took my hand and stood. Things were now progressing toward…whatever they were progressing toward.

Quickly turning away to finally adjust my boner, I left Rex’s side only long enough to turn the lock on the shop door and flip the “Closed” sign, then hurried back. Together we headed toward the interior door and the privacy that would allow that next stage to come into fruition, while the windows rattled and the black storm howled and roared around us.

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, given 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.

Rex and I made out helplessly for a few minutes, like it was our natural state, our mouths and muscles and cocks a single thing that could hardly tolerate separation. This in itself was weird enough for me to hesitate and break off. As I pulled back, staring in aroused bewilderment at this stranger I was somehow joined with, in the utter silence of the house we heard a distant banging that made my doggo ears twitch.

I knew that sound. We didn’t open late often, but sometimes in the course of the day you have to leave the shop momentarily to gather supplies from the storeroom or take care of personal business. It is of course a rule that as soon as you do a wild customer will appear and thump, politely but firmly, against the glass shop door, and the metal of the frame against the deadbolt produces a distinctive rattle. I was surprised to hear it all the way up here in Thad’s bedroom, but… well, the house was quiet, and, fuck, I had been so distracted following a certain sodden-denim-clad ass last night, I couldn’t remember whether I’d even closed the door into the house from the attachment. For all I knew every door between us and the shop was standing insolently open in shameful testament to my impatient, slavering lust.

We both looked toward the door, then back at the other. Rex’s slightly chagrined smile seemed to mirror my own. “We’d better get down there before they try the front door to the house,” Rex said.

I nodded. Customers did have a bad habit of walking around the shop and checking the doors of the attached house if the shop door was locked—especially during business hours, though not exclusively. Interesting that he knew that. Was it a guess, that patrons would be likely to behave like that whenever a store was attached to a private dwelling? Or did he know from direct experience? “Or Amir decides to help them instead,” I added, as if we were listing potential retail calamities.

Rex shuddered theatrically, and we both grinned. Again, I had to wonder: was he guessing that our brusque, frowny, hot-tempered greenhouse manager was terrible at customer service based on having met him for thirty seconds—which, fair enough had been thirty very representative seconds—or did he have actual first-hand knowledge? I liked the mysteriousness Rex projected, but part of me craved to expose everything about him so that there would be nothing between us. It was a familiar feeling.

I reluctantly tabled all Rexly enigmas as I climbed out of bed and was confronted with a much more urgent problem. “What the hell do I do with this thing?” I asked as I turned to face him, my massive, clavicle-high erection batting at the hollow of my throat like a cat trying to smack the dot from a laser pointer.

Rex lounged in bed, ignoring the identical behavior of his own monster dick. “Looks good on you,” he purred, his smile turning slightly lascivious.

A flush of heat stirred through me. My balls—huge, hefty, and very tight at the moment—seemed densely freighted with near-boiling arousal, and I was sorely tempted to metaphorically throw everything to the wind, climb back into bed with this man, and find out exactly how far I could shove this dick into that magical, perfect ass.

But I was raised to be the responsible one, if only by default after the first two brothers had proven themselves useless practically before they were out of diapers. Thad wouldn’t thank me if I let his business go to seed while he was away with family. I focused on Rex, who was show no such signs of rectitude as he eye-fucked my new form, one hand straying idly to the wide, iron-hard erection traversing his torso. “C’mon, seriously,” I nagged. “It’s your fault I’m like this.”

His eyebrows lifted—damn, even that looked sexy on him. “My fault?” he repeated, amused.

“Well, yeah,” I said, gesturing at my transformed body and ungodly cock, which I didn’t dare even come close to touching. “You did this to me. Fix it!”

This time Rex looked genuinely surprised. “I did this to you?” he echoed.

I have him a hard look. The parroting thing was getting old. And how could the onus here be in dispute? He clearly had some kind of physical morphing power, which he’d used on himself the last time he had access to the necessary catalysts—Thad’s special hash and a willing “co-pilot”.

At first meeting I’d thought he’d been born this way and was looking for help going through surgery to normalize his mutations—though the size of his dick was so inhuman it was clear in retrospect that I’d actually doubted there was anything mundanely genetic about his abnormalities without realizing it, because on waking up to find myself identically transformed I was already primed to accept the obvious explanation. Rex had changed himself at some point in a few pretty extreme ways, which suggested a certain lack of control when under the influence. This same lack of control must have resurfaced last night: given the opportunity to scale back his own self-willed anomalies, he’d instead succumbed to temptation and wreaked his magic on me until I was just like him—ears, cock, inhuman beauty, and all.

To me it felt like a kind of rebellion on his part, like… not only was he not giving up his ears-and-cock body, he’d escalated the offense and given me one, too. Defiance by proliferation.

My oldest brother Viktor was like that. Once he’d had a spill on his bike on the way to summer school that tore up and, basically, ruined the thin tee shirt he was wearing. So he hauled it off and just brazenly strutted into the school building and right through the halls with nothing adorning him from the waist up except a wide smile and the stud in his right ear, like he was the cock of the walk and had license to do such things because he was him. When the vice stopped him, angrily demanding to know how he dared exhibit such singular audacity like a fox in a henhouse, Viktor randomly grabbed a passing senior—it turned out to be Leroy Keene, top scorer on the all-state lacrosse team—and literally ripped his shirt off, too, essentially not merely refusing to redress his behavior but doubling down on it. Leroy was a smiley, easy-going guy by nature and happily went with it, and the two of them started gathering a crowd and boisterously agitating the injustice of shirts right there in the science wing corridor. There ended up being shirtless protests for two weeks until the district responded, rather insidiously, by installing a brand new, extra-strong, high-powered central-air system. Soon after that everything went back to normal, except with pokier nipples.

I should not be thinking about poky nipples, I reminded myself. I glared at Rex and gestured at the immensely heavy giant steel-hard erection still bouncing wetly against my collarbone, as if he needed reminding what the issue was.

Rex shrugged. “How do you normally get rid of a hard-on?” he asked, as if he were an enlightened guru patiently guiding an initiate toward a self-evident answer. He glanced down at his own mirror-image phallic monstrosity, red tongue darting out briefly, and it hit me, like the discovery of a second sun in the sky, that his cock—and therefore my cock—was very much in reach of what I now knew to be his loving, attentive, extremely talented mouth.

“Sh-shhi-i-t!” I whispered shakily, and then suddenly I was going to cum. Oh, fuck.

“Drink it, Lex!” Rex coached as I stared down at my purple cock-head, so close it was like I’d zoomed in on it. I understood doing so would be a practical way of limiting the mess, but just the idea—

“Do it!” he urged, and I was already climaxing, the bright pleasure of orgasm sizzling up my spine as I bent down and wrapped my mouth around my cockhead. I was barely in time, the slick of my cum drenching my glans and rocketing against my soft palate as pushed down further, my grapefruit-sized nuts contracting hard as thick, wet pulses of pleasure shot up my arm-sized dick and crashed hard against the back of my throat. I grabbed my cock with both hands, as much to stem the flow as add to the pleasure, but my orgasm relentlessly pounded through me and I entered a white-hot reality saturated with an ecstasy to fierce and intense to be endured.

Just as quickly it subsided. My mouth disengaged with a pop, and my massive dick, straight as a flagpole before, now listed to the side, sagging slowly as it reluctantly deflated like a bouncy house after the birthday party’s over and the guests have gone home.

“So hot,” Rex said smugly, having watched the whole thing. I glanced up, still swimming in the immensity of my orgasm. My mouth felt abused and my chin was smeared with jizz. My doggo ears twitched again.

Rex was observing me with rapt appreciation. He hadn’t cum himself yet, but somehow I could feel that he was very, very close. “Maybe we’ll keep you like this for a while,” he said, his tone teasing, like I might not be given a say.

I narrowed my eyes at him, but just then we heard another round of banging at the shop door, and I knew my choice words on the subject would have to wait.

I wiped my mouth on a discarded towel and set about making myself presentable. Quickly, I found a pair of Thad’s jeans—Rex’s were hanging in the bathroom and would still be damp, and my own would now be too small for me—and with some difficulty managed to manhandle my not-exactly-flaccid monster dick down one of the legs. At least the fact that the pants were too big (because they were Thad’s) provided an advantage in that regard. I pulled on a red Hashery tee shirt from one of the drawers (this also was Thad size, a 3XLT, but I wasn’t swimming in it like I should have been) and turned to go—then abruptly rounded back on Rex in a panic.

“I can’t go down there like this!” I said, pointing to the top of my head and the German shepherd ears I’d acquired there.

Rex just lifted his eyebrows. Seeing that he had no ready solution, I looked around hectically before spotting something that might work. Striding over to the open closet, I grabbed the straw cowboy hat Thad had picked up on a trip to New Mexico off the peg on the back of the door and dropped it on my head.

I turned back to Rex with a grin, adjusting the hat from the front as if I were tipping it politely at him. He was laughing his approval. “Catch you later… pardner,” I said, nodding stoically at him.

Rex was still laughing. “Absolutely,” he said. He was actively stroking his adamantine cock, the beast already having left quite a mess along his collarbone and around the base of his throat. Despite his chill demeanor I knew he was definitely close to cumming, even using a certain amount of conscious effort to hold back and edge himself before releasing. I wondered how I could tell so easily.

Okay, mysteries later, I thought as I toed into an old pair of Thad’s too-big sneakers, sealed the Velcro, and hurried down the cherry-wood stairs. Time to pretend to be normal.

I felt the weight of it more than anything as I jogged down the stairs and into the back kitchen, reversing our route from the night before. The constant brush of warm, solid cockflesh against the whole long length of my thigh—a thigh longer than I was used to, like everything else about this upsized body—was weird and exciting, but… fuck, this had to be ten pounds of thick, snakey, knee-length phallus I was hauling around, to say nothing of the denser, much expanded balls I’d barely packed behind the fly of Thad’s loose-fitting jeans. The weight of my new junk pulled steadily at my groin muscles, but like all the rest of me I was seemingly iron-strong down there, too. If anything, the steady, low-key tug was eerily nice and low-level gratifying.

My shoulder brushed against the door frame into the mud room, and I had to amend my assessment. Actually, more than anything, I was feeling the pleasure this body generated merely by existing. Not only did this Rex-bod draw men to it like a magnet, going by Rex’s stories and my own otherwise inexplicable behavior the night before, but it felt amazing just to be inside it. Every touch, even from an inanimate door frame, was like a roué’s caress. I shivered, and my doggo ears twitched in appreciation from within the confines of my borrowed straw cowboy hat.

Doggo ears… muscles… a knee-length cock… some else’s face… why was I not freaking out?

Mysteries later, I repeated to myself. I got to the solid white door separating the shop from the house and found that I had, in fact, closed it behind me last night, though my sex haze at the time prevented me from remembering having done so. I’d even thrown the deadbolt. That meant Rex and I had both heard the banging on the shop door across the store, through a heavy external-grade door, and all the way upstairs. My canine third and fourth ears flicked again under the hat, and I mentally directed my attention to the top of my head as if panning upward in my own personal internal narrative.

Were these things not just real and movable, but functional? Did I actually have the auditory capabilities of an Alsatian in this strange, stolen body?

The banging came again, louder now that I was just the other side of the door into the shop. It didn’t sound angry or impatient, just determined. Our customers were a steadfast bunch when it came to getting their weekly supplies and the occasional special treat. Mysteries later!

I flipped the bolt and entered the shop, closing the door behind me as I made eye contact with the two guys on the other side of the glass trying to get in. The shorter, closer of the two, the one with his fist up ready to try another thump against the reinforced glass of the shop door, saw me and smiled, lowering his arm immediately as I strode across the store.

“Sorry guys,” I said as I unlocked the deadbolt and gestured them inside. It was warm and sunny out today, I noticed, a nice contrast from yesterday’s storm. The shop seemed cool and sheltered compared to outside, like a respite taken from the hot sun under a massive oak tree. “We had a bit of a late start this morning,” I explained to the two sauntering in.

“No worries,” the knocker said with a grin, passing by me with a quick but thorough ogle before strolling into the shop, hands in pockets. His buddy followed, glancing quickly at me and then looking away with a blush.

I had immediately recognized my two customers as a pair of regulars, Eric and Henry. They worked the deli counter at the local Myway! Megamart together and seemed more or less inseparable. I hadn’t seen any outward signs that they were more than very close friends, though “close” was for sure in the most literal sense possible. Wherever Eric was, always cool and confident, chances were his quiet, unassuming buddy was inches away.

They were an arresting pair, and I’d noticed them right away, practically the first week I’d started two years or so back. Though Eric was the leader, as it were, being the more extroverted and more likely to engage with others—slinging his arm around you for a selfie, that kind of thing—it was the shy one, Henry, who looked like a runway model: lanky, long-legged, and naturally buff, with a handsome face, dark blue eyes under messy reddish-brown hair, and a bright, open smile he didn’t show very often. Eric was several inches shorter and generally more ordinary, though he was trim and good-looking, freckle-faced with straw-blond hair; and his near-constant smirk, more wry than malicious, was quite endearing. They both dressed simply, Eric today taking advantage of the sunny summer weather with a tank top and long khaki shorts, Henry in a black tee and jeans; but it was Eric that sported the twin black earrings in one ear and the braided black bracelet snuggling his right wrist.

Eric and Henry were one of the chief reasons I was less than shocked by the cannabis-assisted morphing ability Rex had demonstrated so far at least twice. It was, as I had observed, an incontrovertible truth that most of our customers got better looking and generally hotter over time—to a mild degree, almost as though that were just something that happened around here. But Eric and Henry were well ahead of the pack. Over the two years of their regular Hashery patronage I had watched both men become progressively more ripped: Henry in a sleek, classical way (he now strongly resembled Michelangelo’s David in the elegance and proportion of his firmly-muscled physique), while Eric became more sturdy and swole without being too huge, like an action movie star or the more realistic sort of superhero. His triceps, shoulders, and pecs had gotten particular attention, it seemed to me—though, I reminded myself as I took up a position leaning against the counter and watched him wander the store, Eric’s ass had become decidedly more noticeable as well, and his lats looked like they were trying to escape his tank top.

All that might have been ascribable merely to diligent attendance at Giles’s Gym, the hardcore iron bug establishment in town. Other aspects of their slow, incremental transformation were, however, to me not so easily explained.

I was absolutely certain, for example, that the two men had been close to being of a height when I’d first met them. Now lean-’n’-hunky Henry towered a good five inches over Eric—not the sort of results you got from pushing yourself on the incline press or pounding out five sets of preacher curls.

There were other things, too. When I first met them Eric had had plain brown hair, like a mouse or a muskrat. In the present day it was a lush, fast-growing golden wheat color, and not from a sudden, Friday-night-whim dye job. The change was the culmination of a hundred weeks of minute shifts in hue, luster, and vitality. He buzzed his own hair a few times a month these days, I’d heard, and another customer, a mutual friend, had confided that there was a pool in town over how long he’d go on trying to keep it short before he gave in and let it grow the fuck out.

And then there was Henry’s package. Before yesterday, I would have said the puppy he seemed to be smuggling in his Underoos, going by the size of his bulge, suggested the biggest, fattest cock and heftiest balls I was ever likely to see outside of a Gumroad download. This was obviously no longer the case, as I knew from the very heavy, very real taut-fleshed monster now warmly crowding one of the legs of my borrowed pantaloons, but the fact remained that the shy boy’s awkwardly protruding basket had steadily developed in ponderous prominence bit by bit over the time I’d known him. I’d watched that edging outward of his package in occasional fascination over the years, as with the rest of the changes to my regular customers in general and these two in particular; and when you see someone go from nothing to write home about in the junk department to strangers asking if you had an OnlyFans account, or a shy sidekick looming over a buddy who used to be almost the same height, anyone not in a happy, persistent marijuana haze (which, fair enough, generally excluded most of our client base) might start to wonder what could conceivably be making it happen.

Given that there was one thing all these subjects of progressive hunkification had in common—in a word, us—it was not too difficult for me to eventually suspect the likely agency. Thad excluding me from his after-hours work on a series of “special” strains of signature cannabis pretty much sealed it for me. The only mystifying element was why I had only put the pieces together recently, and not earlier on.

I’d been unsure what to do with this information, tethered as I was by my need to be the Aleksei people saw me as: capable, reliable, the man who held the fort while others went off and did as they liked. No matter the scenario—family, work, a trip to the grocery store—I was the straight man (not literally) in a world of eccentrics. Even the very product I purveyed conformed to this trope. I won’t say I never partook—I enjoyed the basic-brand cannabis we sold occasionally, usually Saturday nights while binging up on steamy k-dramas—but I was like an abstainer compared to everyone else I knew, Thad included. Even Amir toked like the pot equivalent of a mukbang YouTuber when he was off shift with his feet up in his upland cottage, though he’ll tell you that’s only when it’s storming out like a world of banshees and the barometric pressure requires a sympathetic emotional resonance.

So, it was with a certain sense of awed exhilaration that I realized something, standing there against the front of the sales counter with my arms crossed, contemplating Henry and Eric sneaking glances at me as they wandered the aisles of cannabis and cannabis-adjacent goods. What I realized was this: in that moment, transformed as I was, I was not, in fact, “the Aleksei people saw me as.”

I grinned, increasingly gripped by this sudden insight. Fuck, I wasn’t Aleksei at all, I told myself—I was “Alex,” Rex-the-interloper’s twin brother. Aleksei, after all, wasn’t six-four, honey-brown, ludicrously hung, and stupidly attractive, as I now was. Aleksei did not possess these solid, unfamiliar muscles pleasantly stretching my Hashery tee, or this weight on my groin like I had a giant dick made of lead. He sure didn’t have soft and adorably perky doggo ears. Even the straw cowboy hat I’d donned to them added to the transformation. Had I worn it as the old Aleksei people would have laughed, but now it seemed to fit—because my image, today, was as malleable as my very physique. The connection to Rex, an exotic stranger who’d suddenly manifested in my life as if visiting from another universe and whom I now identically resembled, completed the break. Aleksei was yesterday, Alex was today,

This… this was my chance to invent an entirely new me—and that me, I decided in a flash of excitement, was going to be different. Better. Active, not passive. Someone who initiated rather than observing from the sidelines. Maybe it was permanent, maybe it would be like a vacation, but either way this Alex was going to be—

No, not “Alex,” I interrupted myself. That wasn’t enough of a change. Rex had gone with “Alex” only because I’d unknowingly answered to “Aleksei,” but… Wait. Wait. “Alex” was Rex’s twin brother. Which meant that of course it would end up being Rex and Lex.

I huffed a little laugh to myself. Lex. I liked it.

I glanced up at the boys, who quickly looked away and pretended to study our selection of cheese doodles. My grin twisted mischievously as I decided the next tack for this new persona to take.

“So you’re the new dude,” Eric ventured, taking a sip from the coffee I’d brewed. He looked me up and down as he said it, as though he and Henry hadn’t been furtively scoping me this whole time, then offered his free hand for a shake. “I’m Eric,” he said, “and this in Henry. We’re around here a lot.”

I hid a smile behind my own lidded paper cup of extra-special caffeinated goodness. He sounded almost like he was prepared to show me the ropes, him being the experienced customer and me the newbie. “Lex,” I said as I took his hand and shook, trying out the name.

“Lex, huh?” Eric said. “Cool.” It sounded nice when he said it, which I found slightly surprising. I’d had a lifelong aversion to shortening “Aleksei” in any way, but… well, that was the point, wasn’t it? I wasn’t Aleksei anymore. And the proof of that was the steamy dark roast I was presently enjoying with my customers. I let my hand linger in his a moment before disengaging. The three of us took another sip, the sexual frisson palpable in the air between us.

The Hashery offered a wide range of basic-brand edibles along with the varieties more suited to smoking, including strains that were developed especially for coffee or tea. We usually had a small urn set up in one corner, along with edible-munchie samples, as an encouragement to linger, along with other inducements like a comfy sofa and the flatscreen in the far corner that showed nothing but Bojack Horseman, silent but with subtitles, on a six-season loop. (Not that our customers needed any of it—our average in-store time was half an hour easy even without all that.) Aleksei was diligent about setting the goodies up, but didn’t have any for himself, being too responsible to get buzzed on the job while certain coworkers might be distracted or busy and depend on him to actually make sure stuff got done.

Thad was away, though, and in a manner of speaking Aleksei was, too. And Lex—he wanted to play.

It was a mild audacity to start out with. I’d decided that I would make coffee for the patrons, as always—just not the tame, business-as-usual house blend I usually made. A quick “be right back” to the boys, a dash upstairs to the drawer of top-secret contraband drawer for the deep, dark, extra-potent experimental version of our coffee-compatible strain, and here we were. I hadn’t hesitated. The only part that gave me pause was the certain knowledge I wouldn’t run into Rex still pleasuring himself when I got up there: somehow I knew he’d finished with that (satisfactorily, as you might imagine) and had decided to go down and walk the greenhouses with Amir in his role as Thad’s proxy. I was almost aware of him, as though my mind had geotagged his ass and could track him slowly traversing the rows of flourishing, carefully-tended potted pot plants arrayed behind ther glass walls five hundred yards or so directly behind me. That was the part of all of this I tried to ignore as maybe a little too eerie to deal with.

There was plenty of other stuff to distract me.

Like this coffee. I’d only had the regular, basic Hashery brew a few times, but this stuff was bold and rich as fuck, and not just in the normal sense a dark roast usually was. It was like… a song you were used to hearing as a two-voice duet, only now there was a full men’s choir backing them up, plus a rock band and fucking angels singing in registers you heard not with your ears but with some extra dimension inside your head. It was heady, and hard to get enough of. I took long gulps of the hot beverage, feeling the warmth inside my exciting new body on multiple levels. I could tell Henry and Eric were enjoying it too—though, as old hands with the stuff we sold, they were way more relaxed about it.

“So how new are you?” Eric was saying. He was standing close—I thought I could taste the coffee on his exhaled breath, or maybe that was the pot telling me I could—and Henry was right there with him, Eric’s shoulder pressing familiarly against Henry’s firm chest directly behind him. “We haven’t seen you around town or anything,” Eric went on, his eyes sliding off mine to graze across my jawline and then snapping back up. Henry’s eyes were pinned on mine, like he could see inside me and wanted to ogle my inner hotness as much as Eric seemed to be into my ridiculously sexy exterior.

I smiled at Eric and felt his pulse quicken and cock swell. Fuck, what a rush being Lex was, causing reactions like that with the simplest of smiles. “Brand new,” I said. The boys thought that was sexy, too, like I was fresh out of the box and all theirs for the shaping. They drank from their cups while I watched, feeling like I was basking in the heat of their skin, inches away. There was a thrum of connection between us. Was this what it was like to be turned on while you were high? Why had I avoided this kind of scenario before now? Aleksei had been missing out.

Just to keep them there with me I asked them to tell me about the town—playing dumb, as though Lex had just blown in from Saskatchewan or South Succotash or wherever. Eric happily obliged, regaling me with anecdotes about colorful locals and past situations he and Henry had gotten in, one apparently involving a goat… I was watching his eyes and wasn’t really following. Henry chipped in occasionally, quiet but not silent, and blushed cutely at some of the raunchier revelations Eric shared with me. The whole time we all stood there, closer than three dudes having a conversation over caffe grandes typically would—and I mean a lot closer. There was no rush to be anywhere else or do anything different. We were just three turned-on guys swilling mutant coffee, enjoying the pleasure of sexually-charged proximity and the nascent, gently throbbing presence we were increasingly experiencing in each other’s minds.

I found myself thinking about the specific changes I’d clocked in Henry and Eric, as my eyes drifted across his neck and the bulging curves of muscular shoulders exposed by his pink, summery tank-top. That wheat-gold hair of his looked really good on him. Supposedly it grew extra-fast, but Eric kept hacking it off. A real shame, I thought. It would look so hot longer, grown out. Curling against the tanned curves of those firm, rounded traps.

The connection between us felt natural and unquestioned, and through it I could start to imagine tendrils of possibilities. What the golden hair behind his ears would look like a shade or two longer. A bit of growth developed in my imagination like a time lapse, first an inch or so, then progressing more, minutely, a bit more, and a bit more… I watched the microscopic lengthening of his follicles in fascination, like an AI that was modeling an analogue of Eric that was suited to my own inner tastes and desires—

“Whooooaaa,” Henry said suddenly, breaking into the flow of my thoughts.

I glanced at the taller man, noting that he wasn’t staring at me anymore. His gaze was down, locked on the back of Eric’s head.

I blinked and looked at Eric, suppressing a gasp. I thought I had just been following a mental flight of fancy, but it seemed that something decidedly more real had been going on. Unless I was completely delusional (and given the events of the last day or so that wasn’t totally out of the question), the imaginings I’d been exploring across the not-so-notional bond three-way between us had led, out here in actual, physical, molecules-and-atoms reality, to a little Eric-reconfiguration—at least when it came to the lush, wheat-gold hair I’d been fixating on with a pot-toker’s intensity for the last few howevers. Hair that now, far from being close-shorn in the back as it had been, was curling profligately all over Eric’s yummy traps, exactly as I had pictured it doing.

Eric paused in mid-story, blinking up at us. “What?” he asked cluelessly.

I stared at him with a slow, shaky smile.

Here’s what I knew. I’d sussed out that our regular Hashery pot had been engineered so as to naturally induce slow, incremental changes in its users, in various ways according to the different varieties. It followed that the secret, special super-pot the development and trials for which Thad had not included me in must do the same: slow changes, but more intense or specialized. This explained outlier levels of more extreme transformation, like the abnormal changes Eric and Henry had experienced.

This, though. This kind of change over the course of minutes, not years—this was a shock. Like, for example, waking up in a copy of Rex’s body had been a shock, after a night of secret-blend-pot-fueled intimacy with Rex.

Maybe I had it all wrong, but right then there seemed to be only two possibilities to explain this—what Rex had done to me and what I had done to Eric. One was that this pot was really amazingly strong. World-changingly strong. Or… that it awoke in certain individuals a rare mutative ability, one that Rex already possessed and—I guess thanks the bizarre fact of me now being a physical copy of him—I apparently now did as well?

Henry was now looking at me again, his cheeks warm and his blue eyes bright with understanding. Understanding, and hunger. He wanted to see more. Suddenly, in a hot rush, the me that was Lex understood temptation in a way that safe, reliable Aleksei had never, ever known.

Amir and I were in the back storage shed, checking the palettes of supplies like the special-blend perlite-peat-vermiculite we used as greenhouse potting soil (which were looking a bit low—water damage from a brief flash flood during the big storm I’d driven through had left us with only five 18-pound bags) when I felt it—a sudden surge of spiky, heated emotions rippling through my nascent super-cannabis-induced bond with the man I was having increasing difficulty thinking of as Aleksei.

Instinctively I looked up and toward the house and the shop, right in the middle of a conversation with Amir. I must have had a slightly alarmed expression, because Amir broke off what he was saying to frown and ask, “What’s wrong?”

I felt Amir’s flinty gaze on me, but I kept my attention on the sensations seeping aggressively through our connection. It felt like Lexy wasn’t so much trying to communicate as experiencing a bit of emotional overload. I wasn’t sure he was even completely aware of the link our sharing of the special weed and a very intimate night had created. Probably he thought that it was a lingering side-effect of the pot, him being able to distantly sense my presence and rough location like a pinprick in the mind, just as I could now position him by distance, direction, and relative elevation; but the connection was there. If anything it was a bit stronger now thanks to Lexy’s intense emotional state… and, shit, that was definitely more secret-label pot suffusing that almost cannabis-virgin brain of his.

I spared a grateful thought to Mike and his pals and the weekend I’d spent seeing my weed in action. I’d played around with this mental connection a few times in the past, but Mike’s fuckfamily had literally opened my mind to the full potential of the cannabis bond. Lexy, however, was a newbie. He hadn’t even grasped that he had gradually changed himself to emulate my corporeal configuration in every detail last night, down to the doggo ears and the solid knee-length megawang. No, he’d been sure I’d deliberately done it to him, like I was such a narcissist I thought everyone should be as hot as me and was going around changing the whole Front Range urban corridor into myself one dude at a time. I might have contemplated a few tweaks and twists for my boyishly pretty second-in-command last night during some of the less lucidly rational moments we’d shared in bed the previous night, feeling the rush of having a connection and changes potentially being open to me again, but making anyone look like me had been pretty much the last things on my mind. Anyway I’d been sure we’d have to build the link up over a string of nights together before it was strong enough to pull off the reversion to my Thad form I’d been aiming for this whole time. That Lexy had been able to develop a strong enough communion between us to leverage a full-body transformation was almost as much of a shock to me as the change itself had been to Lexy.

Maybe there was something about Lexy that made him more adept at the mindlink-enabled, super-cannabis catalyzed body remolding thing than I was. I had to admit that grated a bit, seeing as I had invented the stuff that made it possible. But then, Mike’s friends were all naturals, too, as attested by the canine ears currently twitching atop my head—these having been almost negligently gifted to Zac, whose body I had more-or-less accidentally ended up inhabiting, by a hairy, easygoing gorilla-armed stoner in the group as a lesson in humility. To me it seemed a little unfair: I’d been the one experimenting and fine-tuning a dozen-plus varieties over years of clandestine effort, only for ringers like Brandon and Lexy to swoop in and develop an easy transformation proficiency literally overnight. But I was also enough of a pothead to see my own creation spurning me for prettier brains as pretty fucking funny.

What Lexy was transmitting now seeming in tune with my theory: he was radiating the kind of awed alarm you might experience if you discovered one day you had superpowers by, say, accidentally squeezing your phone too hard and turning it into a twisted hunk of metal the size of a crispy bacon strip. It wasn’t exactly words, but the sense of Lexy’s agitation came through clear enough. I changed him… did I change him? what am I doing?… am I stoned? is this real? … what the fuck did Thad put in this pot?

My face twisted in a small smirk. It looked like Lexy had decided to get a handle on what the secret strains I never talked about could do by sharing a round with a couple of regulars, and things were already getting out of hand. I felt a quiver of excitement in my intestines.

The thing was, all this time I had cautiously been limiting myself to painstakingly slow nudges to my customers and a few friends over months and years, not wanting to rock the boat with anything too noticeable. Then I’d shown up looking like this, and far from the world ending I had instantly seduced my sexy, formerly-reserved right-hand man, almost by accident. Not only that, next morning Amir had walked in on the two of us looking like cloned refugees from a fantasy-themed gay romance novel and barely batted an eye. Consider the boat rocked, I thought.

Maybe it was the rush of seeing the guys back at Mike’s changed so radically, and Lexy, someone so close to me, not just getting bigger and more hung but actually becoming someone else, and at a rate even more breakneck than most of what I’d seen at Mike’s. Maybe it was knowing there was an undo button, given the right amount of effort and volition and a willing partner. Maybe it was the unexpected existential liberation of not actually physically being Thad anymore that had started at that Burger Jack on the way back and had only gotten stronger once I was home, unrecognized, and responded to in entirely unfamiliar ways.

I don’t know what it was ultimately, but I was feeling… reckless. My inhibitions were snapping like balsa wood at a karate exhibition. I might regret it later, but this me, this person I was in this moment, was all the way done with wary and gradual.

I focused on Lexy’s mind, a singular external node in my consciousness that I could reach out to with ease as though he were in the room with me and not six hundred feet away in the shop. Go for it, I thought to him.

I felt Lexy’s shocked surprise at my mind connecting actively and deliberately with his. Beyond his node I could feel, much more faintly, two others—the regulars he had connected with, their bonds still tentative. Rex? What’s going on? he thought back to me. Am I stoned? This stuff is strong, but… dude, the hair… the hair grew…

I was smiling now. Just like your dick grew.

Lexy was definitely flying high as a kite on my super-weed, because my mentioning his junk and its new size instantly distracted him. Diiiickkk…

Yeah, buddy. Dick. Think about dick. See where that takes you.

“The twin thing is real, then, I take it,” Amir groused abruptly, cutting into my goading of Lexy. “What’s he doing, asking you for a price check?”

I blinked and turned my chin back to stare down at my crackerjack but irascible facilities manager, his mighty brows lowered like a storm-laden sky, mirroring the equally thick but well-trimmed beard below. It took me a split-second to remember the lay of the land as it now stood between us: that Amir had, quite naturally, assumed me and the transformed-to-look-exactly-like-me Aleksei to be twin brothers—what were the other possibilities?—and that to him both of us were perfect strangers (or so he thought). I gave him a cocky smile. “Something like that,” I said inscrutably.

Amir hmphed, unimpressed. “We should head over to the Farm and Feed, replace this peat,” he said. “There’s a few other items low in the inventory, too. Some of the dry cement was ruined along with the peat.”

I shrugged. “Makes sense,” I said. “Go on, then. Alex and I will hold the fort.”

His expression became a notch more thunderous, and I had to suppress a smile. It looked so cute on him, not that “cute” was a word my fortysomething he-man groundsperson would ever allow to even be thought about him in his presence. “Two man job for heavy materials like that,” he insisted stolidly. “Company policy.” He held my gaze, daring me to challenge him.

I wanted to laugh. Of course, there was no such policy, as I well knew, being the founder and sole law-giver of said company. But “Rex” wouldn’t know that. What was really amusing was that Amir, transparently, did not trust me and my “brother”—actually the owner and his longtime second-in-command—alone on the property. Still, I had to admit I appreciated his protective instincts when it came to came to the Hashery and everything I had put so much money and effort into, even if it meant I had to be chaperoned around my own land for a while.

Heading over to the Farm and Feed would also provide an opportunity for Amir to get gossipy with whomever he might encounter there, staff and patrons alike. Folks in town tended to be low-key curious about what happened up at the Hashery, and Amir was unabashedly communicative of what he had seen and what he thought about it. I found I was less worried about that here and now than Thad—then-Thad I guess I should say—might have been. Besides, I remembered what had happened with my brother’s pizzeria, and I had an inkling that a few whispers about the “twins” might be good for business. Even folks who’d never toked a single puff in their lives might just wander up here to get an eyefull and maybe guilt-purchase a Dr. Pepper or a trial-sized Dash-o’-Hash.

“All right, then,” I said easily, slapping Amir affectionately on his steel-sinewed shoulder and nodding in the direction of the garage and the brace of Hashery four-by-fours waiting there. “Lead on!”

I don’t know why getting crazy blitzed caught me by surprise like it did. Sure, I’d had the coffee-cannabis before with hardly any effect, but then I’d barely had more than a mouthful to satisfy my curiosity—and that was the basic stuff Thad sold to everybody. This—I’d consciously chosen to dose myself on weed from the secret stash. Thad’s hidden supply. The super-strong special strain. And then I was shocked to find myself transmuted into a high more intense than I’d ever experienced.

It was scary, it was unexpected, and it has kind of hilarious. Super-strong weed is super-strong. I giggled.

I was staring into beautiful light-brown eyes—Eric, the shorter, more extroverted member of the meat-packing couple. Heh, meat-packing. ‘Cause they worked at the meat counter.

I remembered what else I was feeling. Horny. And alarmed. My eyes flicked to the wheat-gold hair now curling over his traps like a hair-waterfall caught between moments of an infinite, infinitesimal cascade. I had—had I—?

I boggled. Scared, surprised, amused, aroused, alarmed. I was stacking up emotions like… like a big stack of… stackable things. How high could you stack them? Could you have, like, infinite emotions?

What the fuck? What was happening to me? What did Thad put in this stuff?

I stared at Eric, then at the taller, shyer Henry, both of them standing close, our physical intimacy feeling more and more like a mental connection with every passing second. Somehow—maybe it was the intensity of my high and the communicativeness of those light-brown eyes and his body heat and the certain knowledge he’d been made incrementally hotter and hotter over the last two years, but somehow I could almost feel Eric’s simple hunger for me. It was an id-like carnal response to my borrowed, enhanced perfection of finely sculpted muscle, sleek skin tone, and imperious attraction. He was high, too, but he wasn’t stacking up any reactions beyond a full-on all-consuming lust. He was hard—he was adjusting himself right now. I thought being high was supposed to mess with your libido, that moderately certain belief possibly being the reason why my heavy, knee-length throat-fucker was currently only twitching with the state of heated interest between the three of us and not trying to rip my pants open; but Eric clearly hadn’t gotten that memo. He was so hard, he was like the gold standard for cock hardness. Or iron standard. Definitely iron standard. I giggled again.

I glanced up from Eric’s light brown eyes to Henry’s dark blue ones, such a striking contrast to his messy red-brown hair. I could feel him, too. His buzz was more complex, almost as multivariate as mine. His simmering lust for me and Eric separately was layered with fascination at the interactions between us. There was a sense of powerful stimulation at the awareness of how our mutual high had seemingly caused Eric’s hair to grow right the fuck out of his head, an unexpected culmination to years of being turned on at his and Eric’s slow transformations. Most of all, suffusing that was an almost overpowering craving to see more. More change. More power exerted over the protean masculine form.

My dick shivered and stretched a bit down the leg of my jeans. The a/c was on in the shop but I was warm, like the three of us were a human furnace. I watched a tiny bead of sweat form at Eric’s temple and trickle down to his chiseled jaw before dropping onto a sheaf of new-made mane. Henry watched it as well, excited.

Fuck, was this real? Was I real? Was I doing this, or was it even happening? Did I want more, too?

Go for it.

The voice was in my head, only it wasn’t a voice or words so much as a feeling and a connection. A connection, I realized, that I’d already been latently aware of since this morning. Maybe before that, really. I’d thought I’d started feeling it during our first fuck, off our balls on whatever we’d shared from Thad’s special drawer. It was stronger now, like there a tiny star on permanent orbit around me. If I hadn’t been as high as a telecom satellite I think I might have freaked out, but in that state the connection itself seemed utterly natural. If there was a surprise it was who it was—I still wasn’t convinced I was really on his radar, or would go out of his way to talk to me, when he looked like—

Oh yeah.

Fuck, he was hot, and I was hot. And I was—or, something was—It was wild here. Wild, and awesome, and awesomely flux-y.

Rex? I thought back, confused and excited. I knew he was far away across the grounds, which made hearing from him weird and exhilarating. I wanted to send him a postcard, letting him know how awesome things were here. Having a moment, wish you were here.

But I didn’t have to. He could feel what I was feeling through that node, I knew he could. All of it, or at least, all of the super-intense stuff wilding me out like an emotion kaleidoscope. My arousal, my confusion, my awed shock at the way that Eric’s fast-growing wheat-gold locks had time-lapsed from short-cropped to shoulder-overflowing right before my very eyes in mere heartbeats, lengthening from normal to crazy…

Just like your dick, Rex thought with a very perceivable smirk, and my heart stuttered. I had a kind of stoned flash flood in my head and all at once the thought of dick completely consumed me. Dick. Diiiiick. I felt myself grinning comically.

Rex was amused. I could feel it, which was awesome. Eric grinned, too, and Henry’s eyes glinted. We were all thinking about dick.

Mine was getting perceptibly longer, thickening incrementally at the same time as it slowly snaked down my leg. I told it not to get hard—not yet. The three of us had other dicks to play with. No—the four of us, ‘cause Rex was with us too, in my head. I was connected to Rex just like I was to Eric and Henry. More than that, I could feel his arousal as strongly as my own, especially when I focused on it. It was like I was establishing an increasingly stable equilibrium between us. A chance summer-shower rivulet carving a channel, accreting reinforcements, on its way to being a concrete-sided canal.

I was all about feelings and arousal and heat in that moment, and I could feel Rex’s heat and arousal and heat as solidly as Eric’s and Henry’s, mixing with my own. Me and Rex and Henry and Eric and…

Eric’s pretty sepia-brown eyes distracted me again. “Wanna make out?” I blurted, and, I swear, those words never touched my brain—they came into this world right there on my lips and went straight out into the open air between us  without consulting any of the rest of me. I didn’t mind, though.

Eric’s eyes lit with interest and he beamed up at me, eager and willing—but even before that there was a wash of excitement through our connection, sizzling through Henry standing close behind and beside him. He was deeply jazzed about the transformations, but he didn’t want to feel them—he wanted to see them, with a cannabis-enhanced intensity that felt almost too strong across our new-made, still feathery bond. Henry’s desire felt like it was urging me on, a cheering crowd to drive me forward, putting fire in my belly and power in my legs. He had slid a hand up and under Eric’s now-shoulder-blade-length waterfall of lush, slightly wavy hair, cupping his nape, but his eyes were on me. He couldn’t wait to see what would happen.

Rex was watching too, curious and alert and emotionally invested in ways too complex for me to understand. He was there but not there, his heated presence close, a ghost-twin of me crowding our threesome and making it four. Like Henry, Rex wanted to see what I would do next.

Fine by me, I thought.

Very deliberately, I slid my own hand under Eric’s cascading locks, finding a spot of well-muscled shoulder just under where Henry held him. Our fingers brushed as I bent to bring my lips against Eric’s, and I felt Henry close his eyes with a surge of pleasure as Eric’s sweet mouth made contact with mine and we instantly opened for each other.

We were all closer, even Rex’s ghost-presence, all pressed together. I physically felt Eric’s hard-on against my hip, decidedly above-average in length after two years of minute enhancement and extra-wide, too, more flat than torpedoish. Unexpectedly it was also bent at the middle—almost like a boomerang, though the angle wasn’t that extreme. Fuck, what would that be like inside you? I could sense Henry’s too, pressed hard against Eric’s round and extra-firm left butt-cheek through their jeans. The taller, lankier man’s tool was a good twelve inches long, ramrod-straight and very fat. I reveled in the awareness of both of them and moaned into the kiss, my tongue seeking Eric’s, and maybe Henry’s too, even though it wasn’t him I was kissing.

Eric pushed his long, bent cock against me, hungry and needy. I was seriously chubbed and I could feel ghost-Rex was too, our massive cocks swelling to mid-shin and pushing against the seams of our jeans, but with an unexpectedly iron command I forced them not to get truly hard. This wasn’t about that. This was about the kiss, and the whirlpool of shared pleasure the four of us were feeling, and especially Eric and Henry’s forge-hot, stone-hard, shudderingly awesome dicks, and Rex and I were just there to share their pleasure and maybe stimulate it a bit, boosting things to a new level.

I deepened the kiss, bringing all of us closer as I clasped his neck, Henry’s fingers sliding under mine. I wanted to share this kiss with both of them, make it more. Our tongues seemed unnaturally strong and sinuous, wrapping around each other in the tight, shared confines of our mouths as Eric gently humped me and Henry pressed hand against both of us. My spine tingled with the giddiness of it. I breathed in sharply through my nose, twisted my angle sharply, and then—yes, there it was, I was tasting Henry’s tongue as well as Eric’s, all three pleasure-muscles twisting luxuriously in writhing, slippery-hot stimulation. I quaked with the ecstasy of it, my cock threatening to stiffen to hardness and rip open my pants despite my orders. Ghost-Rex was crowding close, feeling just as turned on, just as overwhelmed. I could almost feel his hand on my back, sliding down to my ass as we somehow intensified our impossible threesome kiss.

A lightning flash of pleasure tore through us and my control frayed dangerously. A firestorm of lust escaped from me, overflowing my pitiful mental barriers and gusting through us as a unit. I felt a pulling, our little universe distorting along our axes like taffy, and it was a second before I realized we were being pulled to expand physically, the force of desire stretching us taller—an inch—two inches—

No, fuck! This was supposed to be about the cocks! I giggled inwardly as my tongue wrestled with Eric’s and Henry’s longer ones, Ghost-Rex hugging us, kissing my neck with sizzling lips, our cocks riding against seemingly needless physical constraints.

I grappled for focus like I was bobbling a cake of soap in the shower. Dicks, I told myself deliriously, dicks and dicks and dicks—

It was a short ride to the Farm and Feed, the dusty, dark green company four-by-four sure-footed on the four-lane blacktop winding gently through the foothills west of the city. Amir was tense, and I could tell he wanted to ask me a lot of questions but respected Thad enough not to badger someone his boss trusted. I waited, playing the part of guest and interloper and feeling uncomfortably like it wasn’t entirely an act. Amir knew me, but right now I felt like the embodiment of the me that Amir didn’t know.

Of course he’d tried to text his boss again as soon as he’d gotten past the shock of discovering two identical, ridiculously hot ‘n’ hunky doggo-eared strangers cavorting not-so-innocently in Thad’s bed. The pings for Amir’s wtf-texts had come through not long after a be-hatted Lexy had trundled down to the shop to take care of the customers banging relentlessly on our front door, and I decided I needed to lay down a sort of standing fib to justify “Rex”‘s presence.

Sitting up in bed and ignoring my massive erection (for the time being), I’d thought a moment and then typed out a response. I contritely apologized for being out of contact and confirmed I was staying at Mike’s for a while longer (true in a way—at least, someone who looked just like Thad had joined the commune there) and that I’d sent my good friend Rex to take up the slack. Thinking quickly to try to ward off Amir’s objections I tacked on, by way of explanation, that my ex was a good egg and that he ran his own gourmet chocolate shop in Pueblo—hinting, I hoped, that Amir should therefore consider him to be as familiar as I was with issues of supply, bookkeeping, and customer service. I actually had worked at such a shop part-time for several months while I was at Colorado State-Pueblo working on a masters at the cannabis research institute there. Amir knew this, and thus by implication my groundskeeper was also supplied with a plausible scenario for Rex and me hooking up and getting serious for a while during this known segment of my own personal history.

Then, as I’d watched the little typing dots bounce, I’d belatedly remembered an additional wrinkle—namely that my second-in-command was also “missing” and needed to be explained. Typing rapidly, I rushed in another text letting poor Amir know that, oh yeah, Aleksei had called out with the flu for the week and that Rex’s brother might stop by to help out.

The dots had dropped away, started up again, then vanished for a few long seconds. I’d watched the screen anxiously, sure my web of lies was way too tenuous to withstand Amir’s notoriously fierce glower. Finally he’d responded with a terse, “Understood. Enjoy your vacation.” Left unsaid but heard loud and clear was the addendum, “We’ll talk when you get back.”

Now, in the truck, Amir was in a state. His hands gripped the steering wheel hard, his sharp eyes all but burning into the road. I swear, the chest hair covering his solid pecs was bristling under his thick-weave brick-red Hashery tee-shirt. For my part I wan’t sure whether to be nervous or amused. Amir seemed to be formulating and discarding various comments, his volatility warring with his ingrained reserve around people he didn’t know. That was the amusing part. If he’d known it was really me sitting there next to him in the matching Hashery tee and worn, green doggo-ears-hiding ball cap… well, he’d have let me have it, no question.

Finally we got to a red light. He fumed for a minute, then burst out, “Cannabis isn’t the same as chocolate!”

Maybe it was the ridiculousness of the situation, or maybe Lexy’s increasingly elevated state was seeping through our bond, but I couldn’t keep myself from laughing out loud at this non sequitur. Of course, this only made him angrier. “I know it isn’t, Amir,” I said, still chuckling. Still, something in my new smooth baritone seemed to calm him. He grimaced, but his hold on the wheel loosened slightly.

I understood where he was coming from. He was emotionally invested in the Hashery and all he’d helped make happen, and as an expert in marijuana cultivation he was second only to me. To him, I was an outsider, a randy chocolatier who had no business running a high-end weed farm and retail dispensary.

“Look, while I’m here we’ll work together, I promise,” I said, ears twitching under the hat. “Anything relating to the cannabis or the greenhouses I will defer to you. Fair enough?”

Mollified, Amir tossed me a glance but said nothing. The light turned, and we continued the rest of the way to the Farm and Feed in a silence that was, I hazarded, not quite as uncomfortable as before.

All this time, the whole way to the store, I could feel ol’ Lexy getting higher and higher and hornier and hornier through our connection. By the time we were at the sprawling farm store and Amir and I were walking the wide aisles between stacks of feed, soil, cement, and whatnot, things were coming to a head. Not literally, but figuratively for sure, and for all the three of them were right there in the Hashery in full view of anyone who might come in, literally was not far from happening, either.

It was kind of fascinating, and a definite turn-on. I’d encountered this kind of remote-access virtual sex before, when I’d been drawn into the wildness at Mike’s and making love was something that you could accomplish almost without actually having to be with a person. That had been more diffuse, in a way, in that it involved a metric fuck-ton of cannabis-fueled arousals and orgasms shared among eight or so other people with severely overlapping lusts and libidos. This was more intense, more intimate. Maybe as a result of that one-on-one connection, and Lexy’s previous co-piloted transformations strengthening our bond, the effect on me now was more extreme. It was like I was being pulled almost physically into their three-way stand-up not-quite-fucking, and it was delirious, euphoric, and disorienting as hell, all at the same time.

I was passing a big palette piled high with fifty-pound sacks of barn lime when everything suddenly seemed to kick up a notch. I stumbled, thunking my shoulder against the unmoving stack, and I let it hold me up a second—fortunately those bags were heavy and settled in and definitely not going anywhere.

Amir had dropped back a few paces to gab with one of the staff (a straw-haired six-foot-eight beanpole in a blue apron who didn’t look a day over 19), I assume explaining who I was to the kid and how I probably wasn’t a grifter out to steal the pot farm out from under his boss. My momentary totter caught both their attentions and they were next to me in an instant. Amir looked troubled and a bit wary, but the kid was all open-faced concern. “You all right, sir?” he asked with a squeak.

Swamped as I was in the heated, intoxicating haze of Lexy’s extra-strong, extra-stoned arousal, I decided to let the lime bags hold me up a little longer. I managed a shaky smile for the kid. He looked familiar, I thought. Probably a customer. If so, I’d have to check on his purchase history later. Him ending up being that tall and that skinny at the same time was a low-lier statistically for my products, though I reminded myself he could have come by his ponderosa-pine proportions naturally without any nudgings from the hash farm up the road. His apron had a white oval with his name, Lester, stitched into it. Didn’t ring any bells, but the truth was right then I might not have recognized my own name, whatever that was.

The kid, Lester, still looked worried, so I tried smiling wider. “I’m okay,” I told him in my best deep-and-smooth calming baritone. To Amir I added, “My brother seems to have put out the good stuff for the customers.”

Amir narrowed his eyes but seemed to read between the lines as intended—that Lexy had not only borrowed some of the special-stuff for whatever he was putting out, but he’d sampled it, too. (Coffee? I thought I could taste coffee, or maybe I was smelling it.) Meanwhile, Amir and I had already helpfully, and accidentally, established the fabled “twin thing” as an excuse for Lexy’s and my empathetic bond. I was guessing he wouldn’t have any trouble taking it the rest of the way and inferring that Lexy’s high was, in fact, affecting me as well. I’d been lying a lot to Amir, either openly or by omission, so the fact that this one was genuinely true was gratifying.

Amir confirmed my reckoning by turning his head back to the kid and muttering, “Twins,” with a sideways nod my way.

Lester’s eyes went round and he beamed at Amir. “My cousins are like that,” he related excitedly. “Identical twins, right? Ronny says he always gets sick as a dog whenever Donny’s wife serves him meatloaf.”

“You don’t say,” Amir deadpanned. Then, unwillingly drawn in, he asked, “Why doesn’t Donny get sick from the meatloaf?”

“Oh, he does!” Lester answered with a grin, nodding. Amir frowned.

They gabbled on a bit more, but I barely followed any of it as Lexy’s libidinous high escalated more and more, ramping up to stratospheric levels just since we’d gotten to the store. It was affecting me physically now, seeping hotly through bone and muscle. I was getting aroused, too, my balls tightening and my cock nudging its way down my pants, though Lexy’s own controlling will seemed to be preventing actual erection for either of us—unlike his partners, who I could feel were as hard as humanly possible. Lexy was kissing one of them, or maybe both of them—there seemed be some confusion about this, as there was only one mouth was joined to Lexy’s in a feverish snog, but Lexy was nonetheless wrestling with both boys’ tongues somehow… as though the other one’s tongue had opened a branch office in his kissing buddy’s mouth, maybe. I could feel their cocks widening minutely—one of them was already wide and flat and it was slowly creeping even wider, bowing out slightly in the middle as it inched its way messily along its owner’s hip. The other one was long and torpedo thick and was somehow getting harder as it incrementally grew, millimeter by millimeter, as though some sort of permanence was infusing its state of erection—like no amount of time could ever let this cock come down from being hard and achieve a more flaccid, unaroused state.

The surge of power and sensation increased and it was like I was there. Holding Lexy, groping him, kissing his neck. Fuck, I could taste the salty sweat where my lips had brushed along the side of his beautiful neck. My other hand found a wide, warm back, then long, soft hair, then a hand… two hands…

“Hey!” Amir barked, nudging me hard in the ribs.

I staggered inwardly, and for a split second there was the feeling of being torn apart. I blinked, and the sensation was gone—mostly, though I still had the faint sense of something having been… I dunno, separated. I blinked, the bright lights of the feed store high overhead oddly dazzling me for a second.

My hard-headed (and hard-bodied) groundskeeper’s hard stare had at least some edge of concern, which was reassuring as far as it went. Lester was looking downright alarmed.

I was feeling lightheaded and generally strange. I needed to sit down and regroup. I essayed another weak smile at both of them. “I think I’m… going to go wait in the truck,” I said. Amir grunted.

I straightened at last, regaining my feet, and as I did so I could not fail to notice that I was now looking Lester right in the eyes. I might have even had an inch on him.

I swallowed. I knew for a fact that even in boots my new “Rex” body was six-foot-five, tops. Which could only mean that in the last few minutes I had unaccountably gained three or four solid inches in height. No doubt the cuffs on my baggy jeans and the bottom hem of my Hashery tee would betray this truth as clearly as my leveling out and maybe passing my beanpole acquaintance here, each of them having drifted up a couple inches or so. I didn’t dare look. Fortunately, I was wearing a Thad-sized shirt (from when I had been taller) and the aforementioned boots, so the effect was probably mitigated. If I had been wearing tennis shoes and no socks, my ankles would have been feeling a bit of a draft just then.

Now, Lester didn’t know me from Adam, so his amazement at my being a notch taller than him was, I was certain, all about how a six-foot-eight guy like him very seldom met anyone his height or taller, be they thin, muscular, or otherwise. Amir, on the other hand… I wasn’t about to look right at him, though as I turned my back on the two of them I could feel his stare burning into me like an acetylene torch.

Well, I thought as I headed back towards the big sliding doors and the sub-baked parking lot, my half-hard shin-length dick lending a certain stiffness to my gait, as a first outing with the staff that certainly could have gone better.

It was with great difficulty that I resisted the urge to stomp after Thad’s retreating “friend” and confront him, now, before this ludicrousness went any further. I’d been suspicious of “Rex” from the moment I’d laid eyes on him and his incestuous lover fucking around in Thad’s bed; and the uncanny arousal washing uncomfortably over me every time he got near, like the very air around him was conspiring with him, seeping into me and rattling all the locks on some very firmly closed doors, had only confirmed my deep-seated misgivings about this too-tall, too-hung, too-perfect stranger. Something about him was disconnected from reality, like a shark in a bathtub, and I’d been determined to unearth exactly what kind of threat to the Hashery he and his brother represented even before I’d watched him twist himself taller before my very eyes in the space of three heartbeats, as easy as Superman bending a tire iron and just as freaking impossible.

But I had a job to do, and I couldn’t succumb to the temptation to protective rage and berserker unreason. I’d already lost it once on the ride down, before I’d clamped back down on myself. I was better than that, stronger than that.

From puberty onward it had been a matter of fierce pride that I almost never let my seemingly extra-strong dosage of fire and vinegar rule me or control my actions—unlike my parents, who if nothing else set an example of how not to handle one’s own volatile temperament. No, I was a rock. An angry rock sometimes, as my sister often razzed me; but I knew who I was and what I was responsible for. With Thad and Aleksei both absent, the need for self-discipline was paramount. A storm was coming, and the captain and first mate had both had the fish and were out of commission. It was down to me.

I made short work of collecting the peat, dry cement, and other miscellany we needed on my list, and before long I was standing at the front desk settling the invoicing with Orel, the assistant manager, while Lester rolled the dolly with our purchases out to the truck. I watched him disappear through past the wide sliding doors thoughtfully.

“You seem distracted, old buddy,” Orel said pleasantly. I glanced over at him briefly. He was a cheerful, middle-aged fellow, pale and bony with wispy hair that seemed to be fading year by year, as if the retail life were leeching the color from him; but he always had a warm and genuine smile even for the most entitled of customers. Seeing what he dealt with every day, I often wondered how he did it. He was friendly with everyone, but if you were at all nice to him he was downright chatty—good for me, as I liked to keep up with what was going on in the area. “Everything okay at the Hashery?” he asked.

“Not sure,” I said shortly, eyes black on the now-closed entrance doors. “You ever see him before?”

“Who? Lester?” Orel asked, sounding puzzled. “You’ve met him before. He’s been here, what, ten months or so?” He huffed a laugh. “I thought he was tall when he started, but I swear he’s still growing. Might be knocking his head on the rafters if he keeps going much longer,” he joked.

I finally turned back to face him. “No, not the kid,” I said irritably. “The guy I was with.”

“Ah, the hottie,” Orel said, nodding sagely.

I narrowed my eyes at him, though I couldn’t help an exasperated half-smile. “Not you, too,” I said. My own junk was still coursing with the stimulating heat of the fucker’s sustained proximity, and I was uncomfortably aware that the present conversation was merely postponing the moment when I’d be trapped in an enclosed space with him again all the way back to the farm, trying to pretend the barely twisting, baby-foothill road demanded every iota of my attention. “Besides, what would your wife say?” I teased him.

Orel winked at me. “‘Give me a full report,’ probably,” he said with a grin. “Your boys are just her type, all tall and muscley and—well, I’m straight and I kind of see her point. I know for a fact that your boss is on her freebie list, and—”

I stopped him. “What exactly do you mean, ‘my boys’?” I asked.

Orel cocked his head slightly. “You know they’ve been calling it the Hunkery, right?” he said. “Your store seems to draw all the hot, hunky guys out of the woodwork, all flocking up the hill like bees to a hive. We’ve even started taking bets—any tall, muscley, good looking guy comes in, we take odds he’s a Hashery Boy.” The assistant manager glanced around at what could be seen of the huge store from where we stood, as though hoping to see one of the boys in question. “I never knew there was so much tight, sexy muscle out there.”

He seemed to recollect himself and turned his eyes back to me, and I watched in some surprise as they flicked down my thick, necessarily tight brick-red Hashery tee. “Present company included,” he added. At this point I couldn’t even tell if his saucy tone was just to rile me. People like to do that—try to get on my nerved judge enough to nudge me into hulking out emotionally. A long time ago that kind of behavior in itself was enough to get my molars grinding, but after long years of meditation I’ve decided to find it amusing.

“I’m not a ‘Hashery Boy’,” I said flatly, holding his gaze as though daring him to glance down at my chest again, the ghost of a smile playing at my lips.

“No,” Orel taunted, eyes twinkling, “you’re definitely a Hashery Man.” He smiled, then gave up the game and glanced toward the doors I’d been staring at. “So who is he? You hire one of your best customers? Sounds like a risky move for a pot store.”

I’d looked back toward the doors too, though from where we stood we couldn’t see anything of the parking lot or the truck where the object of our discussion was waiting for me to return. “He claims to be a friend of Thad’s,” I said after a moment.

“Claims to be?” Orel echoed.

As we watched the wide glass doors slid open and Lester came back in, pushing the now-empty dolly. As he passed through and the doors rolled closed behind him he stopped and adjusted what had to be a very healthy-sized erection under his apron before starting the dolly rolling again. A moment later he was gone, swallowed up by the main aisle leading toward the back of the store.

“Thad vouches for him,” I admitted at last. “But he and Aleksei are away, and… well, there’s something off about him, is all.” I didn’t mention the equally suss twin brother, not wanting to get Orel drooling again.

I turned back to my friend. His expression was philosophical. “Thad trusts you, Amir,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to get to the bottom of things.”

He held his gaze, no doubt resisting wiggling his pale brows through a supreme effort of will. I squinted at him. “When did you become a perv?” I asked.

He grinned. “When did you become a monk?” he shot back.

I grimaced. “See you around, Orel,” I said, turning on my heels and heading toward the doors myself. Orel’s soft laughter fell away as I left the store and the doors slid closed behind me.

Rex was leaning against back of the truck as I approached from the store, watching me warily, arms crossed over his thick chest, his stupid ball cap shading his eyes. I ignored him for the moment, instead taking a long look in the bed to confirm the cargo was secured. Then there was nothing for it but to pull open the driver’s side door and climb in.

Rex did the same. He got himself into the seat and pulled the door shut. I pulled mine shut at the same time. The silence afterward was profound. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel Rex holding himself stiffly against the passenger door—not cowering, just aware that I was upset for reasons that had to do with something he felt guilty about.

I frowned. There was something familiar about this tableau. Thad didn’t like dealing with me when I was angry, either, especially when I was angry and right (which I usually was). Maybe this Rex guy had gotten the straight poop on me from Thad. If they really were friends, Thad could have been filling him in for years. That idea should have comforted me, reinforcing as it did Rex’s reputed connection to my boss and therefore the legitimacy of his presence. Instead my ire was, if anything, stoked deep into redline territory by the consequent infuriating awareness of just how much had been going on that I hadn’t known about.

Without looking at him, I let out a long, controlled breath and said, “Explain.”

Rex shifted awkwardly in his seat, making the upholstery grumble. “Explain what, Amir?” he said diffidently after a moment, watching me the whole time, like he was giving me an out. Did I really want to have this conversation?

I’d been reining it in pretty well up to this point, but Rex speaking my name that way, like we’d working side by side for ages, made me finally lose it. I was so angry my beard was bristling with static energy. I rounded on him, the cab of the truck feeling small and full of big men and muscle and sexual energy, and my amped up emotions filling the rest of the space to saturation. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said sarcastically. “How about your unnaturally perfect body? Or your impossible knee-length dick? There’s a conversation-starter.” In a lightning move I reached up and whipped the ball-cap off his head, causing his dog ears to pop up and twitch in irritation. “How about these!” I raged, gesturing with the hat at his canine appendages. “Or the fact that you’re so sexually provocative and intrusive just being near you makes my dick crave your ass and my blood burn for you to kiss me! Or how about the fact that I just watched you grow four inches taller right in the middle of the fucking Farm and Feed!”

Rex gaped at me for a beat, then his lips twitched and his dog ears perked up. “Your blood burns for me to kiss you?” he repeated. He sounded a little smug, and more than a little turned on.

It was unbearably temping. We were so close in the small cab. I could grab his neck and mash our mouths together before you could say “lost weekend.” My tongue fucking ached to taste his. My hands yearned to feel every honey-brown inch of his stretched-out, lanky muscle-bod. And that was ignoring my dick, which—well, it didn’t want to be ignored, let’s say that. I wasn’t sure exactly when in the last two minutes it had gotten rock hard and utterly desperate, but it had, and my heated-up balls felt like they were on maximum overdrive, producing flood-level quantities of hormones and cum—enough for us both to drown in.

I tried not to pant as I retorted, “Is that really the one you want to focus on?”

His smile grew slightly, but only on one side, becoming a bit more lopsided and and even more intoxicatingly irresistible. “Kinda,” he said cheekily.

Enraged, I grabbed the fabric of his tee shirt right over his chest into my fist and yanked him toward me, our mouth crashing together like colliding freight trains. We kissed hard and hungrily for a few delirious seconds, then I shoved him back—only far enough that my face was right in his, inches away. “Are you conning me, Rex?” I growled hotly, my arousal only intensified by the kiss. Damn it!

“Amir—” Rex said gently, blinking at me. His breath was hot and savory on my lips. I realized that he wanted, maybe needed, to resume the kiss just as much as I did. Maybe all the sex-compulsion he filled the air around him with affected him, too.

I tightened my grip on his shirt, shaking him a little. “Are you conning Thad?” I pressed.

“What? No!”

He tried to pull away, but I held him close, my eyes boring into his, our breath mingling. “Then explain.”

Rex seemed to need to focus for a second, as if he were fighting through a low-grade high. Odd, as I was pretty confident he hadn’t taken anything today. I knew the physical signs, working where I did, and he wasn’t showing any of them. “The pot we sell—” he tried. “—that the Hashery sells—”

I interrupted him. “I know it slowly grows the customers,” I said blandly.

Rex seemed surprised. “You do?”

“I’m not blind. Those effects,” I ground out, “are minuscule and accretive. It doesn’t explain donkey dicks or fucking doberman ears!”

There was that slow, crooked smile again. Fuck, was that a dimple? “German shepherd, actually, I think,” he said.

I held his gaze, shaking him slightly again, though this time it was a bit playful. I might be a hothead, but in an intimate setting I’m also very responsive to the moods of others. “Not… the… point.”

Rex huffed lightly, then on an impulse he leaned forward and stole a brief, soft kiss. I let him, my fat dick quivering in my pants at the criminal lack of touch. Or tongue, or ass. Especially ass.

Rex licked his full, red lips and continued. “I—Thad—he developed… special strains,” he said, his voice a low rasp. He still seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on what he was telling me. “They create much more intense effects.”

He saw my eyes narrow and jumped in before I could object that that still wasn’t enough. “No, there’s—how do I put this. One factor that only… recently became obvious was that the special strains create—”

He paused, and I stared him down, demanding he finish. He licked his lips again. “They create mental bonds between two or more people sharing the high,” he said. “Over time those bonds become deep enough that you can… change… each other.” He twitched his dog ears in demonstration—the dog ears I somehow kept forgetting about, because everything about him was immensely distracting. And now he was telling me…

We were still barely centimeters apart. I needed a second to process, and while my brain was chewing on that I gave in and stole a kiss of my own. Finally I met his eyes again. “So… it’s not a twin thing,” I guessed.

Rex shook his head slightly, causing our noses to brush. With a slight smile he said, “It’s a superweed thing.”

I nodded, then kissed him again, because I really couldn’t help it. I kept it brief, though, because all this felt really urgent, like something dire was happening that I was almost seeing, almost understanding. “And what happened just now in the store…?” I nudged.

Rex nodded, then hesitated. When he spoke, he seemed to be choosing what seemed most important to tell me. My anger wanted to flare a bit again at that, but I let him finish. “Lex seems to be… adept at strengthening bonds and effecting change in—” He stopped, and his eyes widened in alarm, while at the same time becoming less focused. “Shit, he’s linking with me again…” he said. “He was—preoccupied?—before, but… shit!”

“What’s wrong?” I demanded, but I knew. I could already tell what was happening—Rex’s scalp was now pushing against the ceiling of the cab, forcing his head forward. At the same time, his tee shirt was pulling out of my fist as his chest expanded, stretching the fabric tighter and tighter across his thickening pecs.

“Unh!” he grunted, grabbing at his pants leg, which was now pulled absurdly tight around both his actual left leg and a cock that looked like it was trying to become his middle leg, all crammed into too little denim. He looked up at me urgently. “We have to get back,” he said.

Though impossibly turned on, I dutifully started the truck and squealed out of our parking space. Watching all that slow growth of our increasingly humpy and Adonis-like customer-base—the so-called Hashery Boys, as Orel had said—must have built up a growth fetish in me I hadn’t known I had, because seeing that previously-glacial hunkification time-lapsed into seconds was the hottest thing I had ever seen or imagined. “What’s going on?” I barked.

Rex was distressed. “It’s Lex,” he panted. “He’s too powerful and he’s incredibly high, and he can’t—unh—he can’t control it. Not trying to. Growing all of us, getting off on it. And there’s something else,” he gasped.

I turned onto the highway and then glanced over at him, almost blowing my load at how huge he was getting. A few more minutes, I thought, and he might literally be too big for the truck. Shit. “What is it?” I asked impatiently.

“S-something’s egging him on,” Rex said. “I keep hearing it.”

“Hearing what?”

“‘More,’” he said, huffing painfully. “‘More, more, more.’”

“Son of a bitch,” I swore. I pressed the accelerator all the way down, and we tore out of the little retail-industrial patch where the Farm and Feed was, racing back up the mountain road toward the Hashery. “Can you hold him back at all? Mentally?”

“Trying,” Rex said. “He’s so strong…”

I glanced over again. Rex looked pretty strong too, literally—like, “rip this truck in two” strong. His shirt was tearing off him as I watched, exposing golden-brown delts the size of boulders and pecs that were even bigger—irrationally, inconceivably bigger.

Despite the crisis I was actually close. I stomped down on the accelerator. “When this is sorted out,” I growled, “you’d better let me cum in your ass. This hard-on is your fault!”

Though obviously experiencing considerable discomfort, Giant Rex managed to grin over at me from where he was all but filling up the right side of the cab. “It’s a deal!” he grunted, and I sure as fuck was holding him to it.

It wasn’t as tough a decision as you might think. I was still living at home, and my parents were either absent (mom had a sixty-hour-a-week job plus commute in Salina, an hour away) or resentful (dad was permanently laid off and hated that I still glowed with the youth he’d lost). No sibs, and my soccer besties had already booked it after high school to places where the weekend highlight wasn’t knocking windows out of the abandoned soap factory.

The Burger Jack was okay. They paid well, surprisingly, but the franchise was in the middle of nowhere, off an interstate exit no one got off at. We got a handful customers a night if we were lucky, and when there was a rush—a bus full of rowdy, abusive wrestlers on the way to an away meet, entitled cheapskate evangelists from the meeting hall up Route 32A every Sunday noon—I longed for the quiet again. The franchisee, a dumb, grumpy, mustachioed lump who demanded we call him Diablo, was the kind of man who communicated poorly, had a bad habit of changing the schedule to inconvenience us out of pure, random vindictiveness, and stank worse than the rotten hamburger patties someone left out in a heat wave that time. When your life is a doldrums like that, someone like him breezing in, seeding you with delicious, tingling, all-saturating arousal and then, at the moment of mutual climax, sating you with this perfect, utterly complete gratification that lingers with you for hours and, to some extent, days, becomes the kind of fantasy that even in the cold, rational light of the morning after seems totally worth pursuing.

So pursue it I did, and I mean that literally. I’d already noted the business name and address on the silver heavy-duty pickup he drove: a place called Thad’s Hashery out to Colorado Springs. I did some research: there was a website with lots of different varieties available in person and mail-order, plus testimonials from a number of satisfied customers, most of whom seemed to be taking time out from posing for Hottest Insert-Occupation-Here calendars to offer their praise of the Hashery’s products and crew. A little more digging turned up a number of online communities; some were made up of Hashery customers sharing news and tips on the latest blends, but others seemed to be Hashery-spotter accounts posting candid shots of these magnificent specimens in the wild as they went about their business in the streets, parks, and swimming pools of Colorado Springs and beyond.

I had the name of the place my sexy visitor was attached to, and I knew where it was. This was a good clue, but it was also true that he might have been headed anywhere and wasn’t in fact en route to his presumed home base when her stopped to share a night of wonder with a buff ‘n’ bored Burger Jack boy. The solution was simple: for an easy twenty I had my friend Darlene, the morning manager at the Snooz-Away, keep an eye on a certain big, ripped, and basically hard-to-miss customer (“the one in the ball cap,” I clarified, all straight-faced and everything) and tell me what happened when he left that day. She stood out front as he drove off in the early dawn light, and confirmed to me that he took the on-ramp heading west, Colorado-bound.

That was enough for me. I knew hooking up with my mystery man again was a long shot, even if I found him, but it was still a shot. I’d been looking to get out and start over somewhere else for a while now, and a dream-guy hashery in C-Springs was as good a place to set out for as any. I packed a bag, ignoring dad glowering at me from the couch. I texted my mom that I loved her and that I was going away for a while and we’d talk often. She wasn’t surprised and told me to be safe and happy. I texted Diablo and told him I was done being jerked around—by him, anyway. He replied back that I should go fuck myself, to which I responded with a cheery “Will do!” Then I motored into town, got my savings and the money grams left me out of the bank, got back in my trusty Kia, and wasted no time vroom-vrooming my little corner of America, the Beautiful into my rear-view mirror as I headed straight for the I-70 onramp and points west.

Is it still “Go west, young man” if you’re already in Kansas? I wondered with a smirk as I merged into the transcontinental traffic. Whatever. No matter what actually came to pass, in that moment I was pretty sure that with a man like him at the end of my journey my fate just had to have become a few shades more interesting.

GPS placed the Hashery on the far side of the city, toward the foothills of the Front Range, and even drew me a line straight to their front door, but I didn’t head straight there just yet. I’d been driving for seven hours, not counting snack breaks (my fast metabolism keeps those abs tight but it’s a real taskmaster when it comes to staving off the grumblies), and I didn’t want to just show up at the end of the day out of the blue with a cheesy smile and holding a big sign that read ROUND TWO, PLEASE. I needed a shower and some beauty rest before I moseyed up there to see what was what.

Knowing the few boons and many demerits of the local Snooz-Away first-hand (man, the stories I could tell you about that place), I elected not to fall back on roadside motels for my overnight sojourn. Instead, I thought ahead, taking a moment early on, as I slurped noisily at the dregs of my large half-and-half malt in the back corner of a Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, to e-reserve myself a nice little room at a b-and-b not far from my final fantasy destination. It was called the Belvedere, and as I finally turned into their driveway, the evening sky before me all red and picturesquely silhouetting the mountains beyond, I had to agree it was a beautiful view.

The Belvedere itself was handsome in its own right, and a bit larger than expected. I’d sort of assumed all b-and-bs were quaint country houses, but this was more like a manor house, done in the Tudor style and seemingly capable of sheltering as many wayfarers as it needed to. I drove around back, half thinking I’d find old-fashioned stables there, maybe an ostler looking to take charge of my steed, but there was just a small parking lot and a whole lot of rolling countryside beyond. I parked, slung the gym bag I was using as luggage over my shoulder, and headed in the main glass doors to find the front desk.

Here, at least, things were more true to form: the woman who greeted me there was the very definition of grandmotherly—not the little old lady Sylvester and Tweety sort but the ebullient, unstoppable matron who sees everything sort. She was tall and trim in a simple tan blouse and maxi shirt, auburn haired, generous but deft in applying cosmetics, and happy to see anyone who walked through her door. “Hello, dear!” she said as I walked up to the desk, setting aside a Kindle and giving me her full attention. “I’m Mrs. Kendall, the owner. Welcome to the Belvedere.”

“Uh, hi!” I said. “I—”

She held up a hand. “Wait, don’t tell me,” she said, pointing a taloned figure up and down my frame as if to guide her scrutiny. I was a little self-conscious of my travel-rumpled purple tee and worn jeans, but honestly I found the motherly attention reassuring. She pursed her lips and guessed, “Impulse getaway.”

I laughed. “Pretty much! Up and quit my job and just started driving.”

Mrs. Kendall hummed and gave me another quick once-over. “Baseball?”

I grinned. “Soccer.”

She nodded. “Should have guessed from the legs.” She held out her hand. “ID, please.”

I got out my ID and passed it to her. “I’ve played baseball too. You, uh, always psych out the guests like that?”

She shrugged as she keyed in my info. “It passes the time.” She glanced up curiously. “You visiting or staying, Impulse Boy?”

Amused by her inquisition, I said, “Not sure yet. Why?”

“No reason. GRAAANT!”

I took a half-step back from the sudden shift in volume, though Mrs. Kendall, for her part, hadn’t even looked up from her terminal.

A tall, well-muscled, dark-haired and very shirtless young man came through the glass doors opposite the ones I’d used and moved into the little lobby area with us. “Here, gran!” he said, his low baritone as sexy as the rest of him. His smile was easy, and my thickening dick hoped the rest of him was, too.

I knew I was gaping at him, but I couldn’t quite stop myself. He was a few inches taller than my rangy 6-foot-2, tanned, and buff as fuck, with a delicious, lightly hairy torso and long, long legs that filled out those soft old jeans even better than I did mine. In fact he was perfectly proportioned all over, like his body had been literally fleshed out by a gay Instagram artist who specialized in perfect men—more casual than cut, like having acres of rock-hard muscle and flat, chiseled abs that guttered the sweat of an afternoon’s work was just the way some guys were. He was handsome in an open, idealized kind of way, though the lines of his dark brows and sharp jaw suggested a playful edge to his innocence. He was watching his gran, waiting for orders, but I could tell he wasn’t oblivious to me staring at him, either.

Mrs. Kendall still hadn’t looked up, but I wouldn’t have put any money on her not being aware of everything going on in front of her. “Take Bill here up to 31 and make sure he’s happy with everything, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Grant turned to me. “Hi, Bill. I’m Grant.”

“Hi, Grant.”

Mrs. Kendall coded a key card in the little machine and finally looked up, holding the card out to me. I reluctantly tore my eyes off of Grant and took it from her with a mumbled “thank you.” She smirked at me—just full on smirked. “You have a good night, now.”

“Okay,” I said, slightly dazed, as though I were agreeing to take her advice.

Grant nodded toward a nearby hallway, and I followed him. In the close proximity of the connecting corridor I could smell his sweat—it was a clean and a bit sweet, like grass on a summer’s day.

We found the little elevator and got in. “So what brings you out here?” he asked conversationally. The doors trundled closed and he pressed “3”, starting the glorified dumbwaiter lurching upwards.

I was distracted enough by being closed in a tiny box with this young godling that I just blurted out, “I decided to visit the Hashery.”

His eyes lit up. “Cool!” he said, beaming. “Cool cool cool. I need to replenish the old stash myself. I can drive you up tomorrow, if you want! They like it when you come in pairs—there’s a discount and everything.” He aimed his high-wattage smile at me. “You game?”

My brain must have short-circuited, because I just grinned goofily at him and said, “Only if you promise to dress exactly like this!” I gestured at his unencumbered torso and thigh-hugging jeans, as if my come-on needed clarification.

Grant just grinned. “It’s a date!”

Just then the elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Grant gestured me into the corridor. I exited the car in a mild haze of happy-lust, Grant close behind me, and as we navigated the narrow upstairs corridor of the old wayfarer’s inn I found myself wondering if I really had wandered into my own personal fantasy.

No sooner were we closeted in my room and I’d dropped my bag on the folding X-legged luggage rack by the dresser than Grant was producing a lighter and a really fat joint from his back pocket. “Might as well finish off what I got,” he said with a grin. “You ever had Hashery pot, Bill?”

I was going to say I knew my way around a bit of weed just fine, but the point seemed to be that the stuff from the Hashery was no ordinary marijuana. I smirked up at him and raised my hand, palm-wide, like I was announcing myself at a meeting. “Total virgin here, Grant,” I confessed cheerily.

He looked me over. “Twunks as hot as you are not allowed to be virgins,” Grant observed with a wink. He proceeded to spark up his mega-joint, taking a few puffs and holding the smoke in before letting it out in a slow stream. Then he passed it to me between finger and thumb, those provocative brows raised in a kind of challenge, like he was offering me membership in his secret cannabis cult. “This is some serious shit,” he said. “You ready?”

I stared at this smiling, sun-toasted beauty with no small amount of awe. This whole time I’d reckoned my mystery man as something singular, and he still outstripped Grant in many ways, so maybe he was their king, or their Dionysus; but between him, the pics online, and this very real and all but irresistible man before me, I was starting to believe that the hunks I’d met so far were only the tip of the iceberg.

Well, fuck. Accepting the joint, I brought it to my lips and took a long, practiced drag, holding Grant’s avid gaze the whole time. If this was what the men of the Hashery were like, then let’s just say I was more than willing to be inducted.

Life is about limitations. At least, that was what I used to think. You stay in your lane, you let the world’s expectations shape your life, and you get what you’re supposed to get. Anyone trying to change their path down the endlessly twisting, time-walled existence tubes we’re all sliding through at a velocity one notch faster than we think we are was fucked in the head and literally asking for trouble.

I thought that way even as a kid, and looking back at my early influences I’m not surprised. My parents fought everything and everyone and were miserable because of it, not that they’d admit they were anything but smugly, defiantly clam-happy fuckers. My dad was hot shit as a teen—a state of affairs that was pretty much inevitable, what with his devastating good looks, embedded family wealth, and casual proficiency at sports and academics—and the whole thing bent his brain so much he started thinking he was entitled to everything that wasn’t already being handed to him. He was angry all the time. Every store was putting something over on him; every boss was taking advantage of him; every stranger was jealous of him and what he had; every female wanted his dick and was too stuck up to say so. Marrying the prettiest girl in school didn’t satisfy him, because every day there were all these other pieces of ass who wouldn’t admit they were hot for his A-plus body and legendary bed skills. Nailing a primo job at the Lexus dealership wasn’t enough, because the sales manager was secretly playing favorites and didn’t deserve the job anyway—not as much as he did. Everything was a fight. I wrote in my snark-journal that his abs were still perfect at age 44 because he was constantly clenching his gut in a simmering rage, and that he probably had the tightest ass in Colorado, too, for the same exact reason.

Mom was worse, not from her own merits but because she was Mrs. Hot Shit. Grocery store managers cringed when they saw her. Other moms either hated her or kowtowed to her as some kind of alpha matron. Her whole attitude was sharp-elbowed, confrontational, and demeaning of anyone who wasn’t her. It was all so exhausting, and—worse, from my perspective—so patently unrewarding.

With parents like that I could very easily have been turned into an avatar for my parents’ entitlement, especially as it was clear early on in my adolescence that I had inherited Dad’s looks and innate potential for a perfect, long-limbed supermodel physique on top of Mom’s lush auburn hair and startlingly blue eyes. Fortunately for me I had an older brother, Kevin, on whom they naturally lavished all of their attention and efforts to make the world revolve around them, leaving me to my own devices. In a house full of self-seeking, aggressive loudmouths, my teenage rebellion was to step back, keep my words to myself, and mind my own business. I watched, did my work, accepted what my parents would have kicked off at, and assured myself that this was the rational man’s path to simple social and human gratification.

Meeting Eric seemed to reinforce all of this thinking somehow. The story of how we met is kind of funny: me picking up a dropped red mitten, catching up with him and silently handing it to him, and the two of us instantly becoming best friends. It sounds like it should have happened on the first day of kindergarten rather that sophomore year in high school, and honestly I kind of wish it had. Eric was my height, maybe an inch or so shorter than my own not-too-impressive stature. He was already pretty ripped at 15 from years of wrestling and hockey, with an easy grin and these pretty sepia eyes that locked onto you and made you feel like you mattered. My soul somehow relaxed when I met him, like I’d been squeezed as tight as my Dad’s ass until I saw those loose, square shoulders and that cute, wide-smiling face.

Eric went with the flow and didn’t get angry at anything. Whatever was going down, he was there for it, with bright eyes and a tiger’s grin. His whole family was the same way. He had a ton of brothers and sisters, a fact that led to a lot of ribald jokes about his parents’ rabbit-like tendencies (it didn’t help that their last name was Cabot), and they were all as keen and naturally even-tempered as my high-spirited, ready-for-anything best bud.

We hung out all the time. Studying together, smoking pot in his room, making out on occasion when we ended up snuggling in his bed during a Hunter×Hunter marathon, like buddies do sometimes, you know? We hadn’t done more than that, really; but we were around each other enough I knew he had a big, bent dick, and as we graduated high school and started working together at the store deli counter, hanging out and gaming and basically being in each other’s pockets, I was… well, I was starting to wonder what it tasted like. I kept it to myself, though. He didn’t see me that way, I was sure of it—I wasn’t even sure I saw him that way. And anyway, expecting something just because I wanted it was the kind of asshole attitude my Dad was famous for. So I didn’t ask. I dreamt about it sometimes, though, creating these little pocket fantasy-scapes in my imagination where Eric was even bigger and even harder and wanted to feel my worshipping tongue on his stiff shaft and my hot mouth around his wide, seeping cockhead just as much as I did.

At some point, I think the summer after we graduated and got a two-bedroom place downtown together, a friend clued us into the Hashery and how their weed seemed so much more, hm, effective than the usual stuff we were used to getting. When E and I were toking Hashery weed we soared every time, like it adapted to our body chemistry to give us the trip we needed, risk-free. Even the come-down was sweet and calming, too, like the high wasn’t ebbing away so much as seeping all the way into us, infiltrating our cells and marrow and making our physical and mental beings that tiny, infinitesimal bit better. That was the fantasy, anyway, and it certainly lined up with how things were going for us in general. Henry started seeing real gains in the gym, and I had this funny growth spurt where I realized one day I was taller than my formerly same-height buddy. We were both hard a lot, too, for no particular reason, work, home, gym, whatever, but I figured that was just the euphoria of actually having things good.

I started forgetting my old stress and latched onto my friendship with a more exuberant-than-ever Henry, letting my eager, extroverted best bud be my ambassador into the world outside of us while we reveled in just being us. I was sure that I finally had things figured out. Just slide down the life-tube instead of clawing at everything around you like the crazy people I was related to, and happiness would find you—and if you were lucky, it would come to you in spades.

I shouldn’t have been too surprised to learn I had it wrong, but the real eye-opener was the twist of exactly what I hadn’t understood about my own perfectly ordinary life and how I went about living it.

We were at the Hashery that day on a whim. E and I were driving around, off work and at a loose end, and our Cherokee just sort of took us up the mountain toward Thad’s. E was driving, and he winked at me as we took the turn up the highway. “In the mood for some special brownies?” he asked.

I grinned at him. He was looking fucking ripped these days, with hard round muscles popping out everywhere you looked. He knew it too—he’d been wearing tank tops a lot more these days, though maybe that was because I was the one buying them for him and he liked to tease me. We were in an interesting place, flirting with each other without doing much about beyond the increasingly frequent makeout sessions when we were really high. Keeping the will-they-or-won’t-they thing going between us was like a game. We were edging each other, and the buzz was its own kind of high. One of our favorite ways to tease each other was to shamelessly come on to the searingly hot guys at Thad’s—especially Aleksei, the fit, elfin-faced Hashery counter guy with the long blond hair and the wicked smile. He loved flirting right back, and I think he’d cottoned on to how turned on I was watching Henry and him act like they were just barely keeping their hands off each other.

I grinned back at E as he downshifted for the hill. “Maybe they have something more… lickable,” I suggested.

He laughed and kicked the speed up a notch, zooming us up the road toward our destination.

It turned out Aleksei was out that day, and instead there was a new guy—this tall, crazy-buff, honey-brown dreamboat with a straw hat and eyes that would have made me bone up if I hadn’t been 80 percent there already. He looked like he was more an invention of the mind than a flesh and blood dude with parents and taxes and a favorite take-out spot. Walking into the shop and seeing him was like entering a place of heightened perceptions and intensified pleasure. This guy was giving off sex vibes in waves, maybe literally—I almost thought I could feel it on my skin, buffeting me like UV waves made heavy and palpable—and we gravitated toward him like there hadn’t ever been any other man on Earth before him.

Then we had the super-strong cannabis kaffe this dream guy shared with us, and fuck, everything was magnified off the charts. We were swimming in hot, pulse-pounding sex. The space between us seemed to evaporate. Of course I let Henry take the lead, and he was more than willing, and we were all hard and close together and Henry and this guy Lex were making out like they’d been doing it this whole time, maybe forever, and I felt…

I felt like we were melting together, the three of us—no, the four of us, because there was another guy joining us, physically just like Lex but somehow mentally very different, though I couldn’t tell how. He was pressed close behind Lex, there and not quite there. All of us were close together and getting closer. I could feel us melding together in our minds, twisting our bodies and our existences in a way that was beyond anything I could have imagined.

We were changing. Growing. It was as though, for each of us, our distinct four-dimensional existence was as malleable as salt-water taffy.

Lex was changing us, or maybe I was. Because there were things I wanted to see and fantasies I wanted to make real, and my desires threaded through the twisting and the melding and the reshaping, guiding and coaxing. As my gaze locked onto Lex’s equally feral, hungry, pupils-blown stare, I started to understand being in a whole new way.

Yeah, we were sliding down these tubes, and things went easier if you didn’t fight what they had in store for you. But if you opened your eyes, you realized something exciting: the tubes branch. There isn’t just one path to stick to and play it safe. There were all kinds of paths! Thick tubes, thin tubes. Tubes that are obvious, and tubes you only see out of the corner of your eye. I think E had known this instinctively, and his—our—happiness owned a lot of the way he unconsciously found just the right tubes to slide down as we went.

But maybe you could choose whole new tubes. Maybe, primed by the intense potency of Thad’s reality-liberating weed and the explosive heat storm of multiple-guy mega arousal, you could twist your way down the unlikliest of tubes and into a new life. A new universe, one that you had only dreamed of. One where fantasies were possible, even normal; and the way you dreamed of being was, thanks to this chosen twist of fate, the way things had always been.

As I stared into Lex’s eyes and felt our tongues wrestle ecstatically in Henry’s mouth, as I twisted our four souls and bodies together, changing, escalating, in the midst of all this uncontrolled excitement I found myself laughing. When it came to limitations, it turned out I could not have been more wrong.

I was Thad. Once upon a time, I was Thaddeus Loukanis, 25, botanical engineer and inventor of new strains of cannabis that unleashed the impossible in the human mind. Then I went to visit my brother, whom I’d been sending my change-promoting blends without his knowledge or understanding, and found myself in the midst of a muscle and cock free-for all from which I managed to escape only after being crammed into the magnificently altered body of my brother’s pizza shop’s best customer’s boyfriend, Zac. This was a man who’d giddily sailed along the furthest edges of erotic morphomania before learning his lesson thanks to a very baked housemate and a pair of German shepherd doggo ears—ears that, as if I were carrying my own penance for my part in this very uncontrolled experiment, I still possessed, along with the Zac-plus augmented body I’d been accidentally stuffed into on the one night things went just a little bit too far.

I drove home feeling less and less like myself. Not only was seducing a burger boy partway home, a very out of character moment for the inward-looking and workaholic Thad, immensely gratifying but, with my present looks and the arousing aura I projected, it was literally as easy as ordering extra pickles on my double-beef Jack Supreme. When I got back to the Hashery the place felt alien in the terrible storm I’d driven through. My own second-in-command didn’t recognize me, and in that moment I more or less became what he saw me as: a beautiful, storm-drenched, abnormally-proportioned outsider in a body made out of pure carnal excess, tossed on the shores of my own life like existential jetsam washing up from the seventh sea.

Oddly, in a way I was better able to connect with Aleksei as this stranger than I had over two years as employer. The dog ears led to me being jokingly monikered as “Rex,” and because I was feeling only the most tenuous connection to Thad that became who I was. I even started to think of Thad as someone other than me. And when I remembered that my own body was still back east with Mike (okay, it had a copy of Mike’s soul in it rather than mine, but still), and kept having to talk about filling in for my absent friend, the shift in self-perception became more and more irreversible.

Then, under the influence of my extra-strong nexus blend and some very intense lovemaking, Aleksei bonded with me; more than that, through some innate quirk of his genetics combined with the circumstances of our link, he managed to gain much greater and more immediate control over the physical changes my weed made possible than I had ever seen, even during the wild, cum-spraying, giant-filled change-apalooza back at Mike’s over the Fourth of July holidays. In the process Aleksei had unconsciously copied my transformed body overnight, turning himself into a perfect dupe of my mutant, heavily-muscled, knee-hung, insanely arousing doggo-earned form.

Interestingly, this seemed to liberate him in the same way it had me, and at least temporarily he willingly shed his identity as Aleksei and took up the role of a second interloper, Rex’s twin, Lex, as much an outsider as his equally arousing brother. I could feel the personality shift through our connection as he let go of inhibitions and worries I hadn’t even known he had, allowing this body and its anonymity give him a free pass to enjoy whatever his new existence brought him.

But Lex didn’t know how strong he was, and the proof of that was… me.

I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. I was with Amir, we were out on a run to the Farm and Feed, and I was feeling the bond with Aleksei—Lex—getting more and more intrusive despite the distance between us. I felt his arousal, his excitement, the blurring of his thoughts as the cannabis altered his feelings and perceptions, and all of that was seeping through me like gas through a grate. More than anything I felt his need for the change he was craving to include me, and he was pulling me to him so strongly and irresistibly I actually started to feel myself crowding behind him back in the store. My physical body was nowhere near him, but I was feeling my bare chest pressing against his back as intensely as I was feeling his dazzling marijuana delirium and his raging sexual desire. I pushed closer, my hand on his arms as he dove deeper into a fathomless kiss with a muscle-pumped, long-haired regular—Eric. His taller, even more handsome boyfriend—Henry—he was so close behind him he was practically joining in the kiss, and I realized I could feel all of them. The four of us, me, Henry, Eric, Lex, we were weaving together like a plait, driving ourselves around and around toward progressively less cautious alterations to our physical beings. Our connected minds were flooded with thoughts of swelling height and thickening muscle and jostling tongues and, louder than anything, cocks, cocks, and cocks.

Bleary with the edgy euphoria of orgiastic escalation I noticed as if from a great distance that we could still fell “Rex” across our distant connection. Rex was still out on that shipping run, far away, and we were drawing him into the growth remotely, getting off on the excitement of it even as the four of us reveled in what we were physically experiencing in that very moment.

Of course, if I had been in my right mind rather than drugged with pleasure and super-strain cannabis, I might have said, “Wait, I’m Rex. What the hell?”

But Rex was on the store run—we could feel him there, Amir bristling with consternation next to him. And I was here, with a cock far too big for pants and some voice in our overlapping minds egging Lex toward more and more transformation. I was here, so I couldn’t be Rex, and Lex was in front of me, my growing chest pushing hard into his back. I looked down. We were alike. His coloring was the same as mine. His brawny, hard-sculpted arms were like mine. He was wearing the straw hat, which I knew hid Rexa-Lexa doggo ears, and I could feel the doggo ears under my ball cap—which I still had despite my shirt vanishing, just like Lex’s had. Or maybe I hadn’t had a shirt that day, or maybe ever? I thought I did, but so much was shifting, uncertain, open and changeable, my memories splitting and forking like a slash of lightning.

I tried to make sense of it. I was in a Rex-like, Lex-like body. Rexa-Lexa, Zacalacka. But I wasn’t Rex or Lex, because Rex was there and Lex was here and I was neither of them. I stared woozily down at my squished-against-Lex pecs, and with the logic of a stoner I said to myself, Well then, if I’m not Rex and I’m not Lex I must be… Pex!

I snorted, and even though they weren’t sure what was funny the impulse echoed through the other three and they snickered too. Meanwhile, the sex-eddy we were making right there in the center of the store was speeding up, spinning faster and faster. Hands were everywhere, muscle and arousal and mouths and lips, all drawing us in more and more. Their sensations pushed through me like they were my own. I could taste their kiss, feel their hardness, the cum churning in heavy balls as the heat swirled around us. I lost myself in 180-proof lust, all of us drowning in that shared thought, cocks and cocks and cocks…

It was a bit of a drive, so Grant and I got an early start. He knocked on my door at seven on the dot, and when I opened up for him, fresh from the shower, I saw that true to his word that lightly hairy, exquisitely honed laboring man’s torso of his was on full display. The still-red early morning sun was behind him, silhouetting his V-shape very nicely while giving the round, striated caps of his delts and the swells of his traps a pleasant orange tinge.

He wiggled those sharp, sexy eyebrows at me. “Ready, soccer boy?” he asked.

I drew in a deep breath, looking him over and feeling my pulse quicken as I did so. Honestly, I was half tempted to pull Grant into the room and forget about my magnificent seducer and his much-discussed Hashery. But… well, I had quit my job and basically crossed a whole prairie to get here, and something in me wanted answers to all the questions kindled by the man who’d given me the best orgasm ever and, inadvertently, woken me up to the stunted nature of my own life. Besides, I was guessing from Grant’s easy, incandescent smirk that after the Hashery my plans for the rest of the day probably involved further opportunities to find out how just much of Grant’s sun-kissed skin I could convince him to expose for my personal delectation.

In the car—we took my Kia—Grant and I talked about Kansas and Colorado and how we’d grown up. We’d both stayed local most of our lives, not really seeing the wider world except through screens and hearsay. It sounded like we’d experienced two different flavors of Middle America, the flats of my world lending folks a more stolid perspective from the mountain fringes he was used to; but there was a lot in common, too. “You have the better weed, though,” I added, smiling over at him lolling edibly in the passenger seat. The new jeans, boots, and no shirt look definitely worked for him.

“Clearly!” he agreed. “Oh—the turnoff is up here.”

We arrived soon after that, and almost from the moment I got out of the car I could feel the sexual stimulation coming out of the building in waves. I was half-hard already from the car ride with my young handyman Adonis, so I gave myself a quick adjustment while the Kia was still between us and headed for the door. The level of arousal inducement radiating from the store was no joke—by the time I opened the big glass door, Grant next to me and the bell tinkling overhead, I was raging hard and in desperate need of a fuck. Walking into the store was like passing through an invisible barrier into a glassed-in tank in which the air itself was transformed into something libidinous and unslakable.

Grant’s hand slid around me, needing that physical touch, and I felt a deep, reverberating thrill as I slid my hand over his bare lower back. We entered the space side by side, our blood racing, overcome with the sex-radiation. That wasn’t all, though—on top of the need to to experience manly pleasure our brains fucking melting with the most intense and transforming contact high I’d ever imagined. It was so strong it roared past merely altering out brains and started flooding into our beings, soaking into us past, present, and future. And that was before we came in range of the cluster of hotness at the center of the store.

We stopped, gaping, our cocks bucking hard in our jeans, seeming to grow and swell just from the sight of them. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. There were four men looking like they were trying to have sex standing up with their pants on, slathering their hands all over each other as they kissed and writhed with escalating pleasure; but these were not the kind of men I was used to seeing. Two were relatively normal, though even they were exceptional; but the other two—

I tried focusing on the nearer two as we moved toward them. I don’t remember moving my feet or choosing to get closer. Hell, we might as well have been on casters, pulled toward then by some kind of carnal gravity. One was shorter, and, strikingly, strong hands were compensating for his relative lack of height by holding him up off the ground by the flanks, his sneakers dangling comically, just so one of the the bigger ones could kiss him endlessly and with extreme thoroughness. This despite the fact for all that he was the shortest of them he was still well over six feet, and so massively built his bare, rippling back looked as wide as it was long. High thighs were amazing, too, thicker than mine and just as impressively sculpted. He was smooth all over, barely a follicle around his lower forearms, yet at the same time thick, golden hair was cascading down that almost triangular back, seeming to grow like a time-lapse video so that it seemed to strain and inch toward his stone-hard bubble-butt, lock by lock, even as we watched in simple, extremely aroused awe.

Pressed in close behind him and slightly to one side, stroking that back under the waterfall of blond and kissing his stubbled jaw, was a very tall, very lithe auburn-haired hunk. He had a face that was almost too handsome to bear even seen in profile from behind, and his lean, muscle-packed body seemed to be the very definition of aesthetically proportioned—as adjusted for a man in excess of seven feet in height. Even given his remarkable lankiness and stunning beauty it seemed like he was the least extreme of all of them, almost as though his preference was to enjoy the radical bodies of others rather than have one of his own.

And then there were the two sex giants.

The two were identical, and they both were, I realized, spitting images of the man who’d seduced me away from the Burger Jack and exposed me to unexpected cock-bliss, though somehow I could tell that they weren’t him. Triplets? Clones? I didn’t even know. The only obvious difference between them was their taste in hats, one sporting a straw cowboy number while the other rocked a trucker-style ball cap. They were well past eight feet tall and massively muscled in a way designed to be achingly beautiful, like every proportion involved the golden mean and the analog key to unlock adoration and worship in the mind of any gay man ever. Even so there was something off about the relationship between their size and their form, like, they’d been scaled up to their colossal height mostly vertically and the pecs and delts and biceps and all expanded afterwards, so that their torsos and legs seemed a few notches longer than you’d expect, and their pecs rode high and disproportionately thick over long ten-pack abs. The most unexpected thing about them was the way their cocks were so ridiculously massive, barely rising off the floor even at full erection, that they actually wore three-legged jeans, the middle leg filled with leg-sized cock and nudging between the legs of those on front of them: the nearer one, the one holding up and kissing the blond bodybuilder, had his rager nudging between the muscle-stud’s dangling feet and brushing against the taller one’s leg, while the cock of the one in back was lodged between the knees of the first sex-giant, who seemed to be gripping the stiff hyper-sized cock with the strength in those extra-long legs.

I shivered, holding Grant close against my side. Imagine having a giant ankle-kissing cock your whole life and needing to deal with the mundane ramifications of such a huge wang… like somehow acquiring three-legged jeans to accommodate your impossible junk. And that wasn’t all there was to the phallic proliferation. I could feel their arousal, throbbing through all their cocks, and even with their backs to us I could almost grasp the twin thick, flat cocks shoving high out of the blond muscle-god’s waistband, covering his belly with thick, creamy precum, and his boyfriend’s dicks were even bigger, tall and straight and made for sucking. Some part of me was shocked at these guys each possessing two magnificent seldom-soft pricks each, but that didn’t make any sense. After all, didn’t both the sex-giants have two floor-dragging dicks apiece? It was normal here. Hadn’t my own double complement of ten-inch throat-pokers, so unheard of in my neck of the woods, helped convince me to follow my double-hyperwanged visitor all the way here? Hadn’t the whole point of Grant showing up shirtless been to get a glimpse of his brazen cockheads nosing past the waistband of his sexy-ass jeans?

I was hot and bothered, completely overwhelmed. My arousal was unbearable. We were close to the four of them now, drifting toward them like our minds were being pulled into a slavering singularity. I grabbed onto a nearby shelf, trying to stop us from burning up in the sun, and turned to Grant, pulling him into a hug and then kissing him, hard and deep. Our cocks rocked against each other, the bare skin of our chests trying to press even closer together. Wait, hadn’t I been wearing a tee shirt a minute ago? I couldn’t think. I’d told Grant to be shirtless for our morning “date,” but my memory seemed weirdly fluid, more ooze than something sturdy, like files in a filing cabinet. Maybe I’d met Grant shirtless at the door, too, half-dressed from the shower, and he’d grinned that bright grin and told me I was dressed exactly right for the Hashery and pulled me out of the room with a laugh, barely letting me check I had my wallet, phone, and keys before we headed off together, equally topless. Had that been what had happened?

Something surged, and everything seemed to kick up a notch. I could almost hear the susurrus under the swell like a sub-bass amp, thrumming a need for more, more, more. My cocks throbbed, sliming my abs as they nuzzled against Grant’s even larger ones pushing halfway up his gently defined abs. My tongues danced desperately with Grant’s, our hands finding every inch of exposed muscle on each other’s backs. We were crazy close, me and Grant and the four intertwined lovers, too, and the only thing I wasn’t sure of was whether their were going to explode with cum at exactly the same singular moment that Grant and I would start high-pressure painting each other with twin coats of hot, salty jizz.

Behind us the door opened, and the bell tinkled. I felt anger, frustration, and arousal, all coming from one man. Behind him, the presence of a third identical sex-giant registered in our heads, like your eyes are closed and you can still feel the presence a third sun on the opposite horizon joining the two already in the sky.

The shock was too much and Grant and I were cumming, and a millisecond later the store seemed to explode as the sex-cluster came too, erupting in radiant pleasure that blasted through us and gave us, like, three extra orgasms on top of the ones we were already experiencing. Grant and I wobbled and held each other up, our brains and bodied drenched in mindless ecstasy. The smell of cum was everywhere, and with the way we were rocking against each other, barely able to stand, I could almost imagine we were on a tall ship, coursing through a wide ocean of sloshing, endless cum.

I blinked, turning to take in the newcomers. As I’d already perceived one of them was yet a third nine-foot tall sex giant, complete with elongated muscle-bod, incongruous hat, and custom-made jeans designed to accommodate two long legs and two even longer hyperdicks, each currently poking their heads out of the cuffs, the glans nosing at the big pool of cum on the floor by his boots. (Instinct told me a similar sight would greet me in the other direction, too: big messes of cum and cockheads looking like they were about to lap it all up.)

The other was a hairy, thick-muscled, dark-skinned man with eyes that were all but sparking with fury. He was shirtless, like all of us, his two ridiculously wide, half-exposed monsterdicks having pumped a lot of cum straight into this dark hair covering his chest and abs. He seemed to be ignoring this, and me and Grant as well. Instead he was glaring daggers at the four lovers who’d started it all.

Not taking his eyes off the group, he very deliberately crossed both sets of powerful, corded arms over his thick, closely stacked pecs—first the top pair, then the bottom, in a closely-synchronized move that seemed like he’d used it before when trying to make an impression. “I understand,” he growled, still glaring at the four men and the sex giants in particular, “that you have a certain need to slake your sexual… impulses. I only ask,” he added, his voice growing dangerous, “that you not do so in the fucking store!”

“Sorry, Amir,” came the response, from two deep voices speaking in not-quite-perfect stereo.

I glanced the other way, and so did Grant. The two sex-giants managed to look both deliciously post-orgasmic and endearingly sheepish. The blond muscle god, now back on his feet, looked happy and sated, his chest covered in cum from his two boomerang cocks; but the seven-foot model hottie looked smug and stimulated. He might have cum from those two towering erections still nudging the bottoms of his well-carved, jizz-coated chest, but to me he looked anything but satisfied.

Grant turned and beamed down at me, making me tingle inside with another dose of that high-wattage grin on top of our lingering afterglow. “Welcome to the Hashery,” he said.

My body thrummed like a plucked guitar string, pulsing along the molecular dimension of my being from the detonation of some kind of sex-bomb right there in the Hashery, its reverberating force so powerful its shock wave smashed through everything around it, rippling outward through us, through the newcomers, through the farm and fields, leaving nothing unchanged and unaffected before finally dissipating harmlessly, its work done, into the hills and mountains around. It had struck each of us like a swelling monsoon, magnifying our already freakishly intense orgasms, soaking though us to our bones and thrilling every cell with unheard-of pleasure. Its transcending intensity seeped insidiously into our four-dimensional beings, infiltrating every part of who we were and the path that brought us here, too strong to be limited even to a single moment in time. There were glimpses of a prurient will behind it, inchoate and half-hidden in the white-out of sensations, but—but, no, that was silly. How could a nuclear orgasm have anything like intent?

It didn’t matter. I felt invigorated, transformed, like I had finally discovered true, all-encompassing ecstasy. You’d think I’d never had an orgasm before, and you’d almost be right. Sure, I’d painted my soccer-boy chest with twin stripes of sweet hot cum literally countless times since I’d gotten my first seemingly indefatigable hardons way back when, and yet the release that had just torn through me was utterly novel and its exhilaration so potent the blissful intoxication of it felt too strong to ever truly ebb away.

I dwelt on those young-me double sprays across my tight torso fondly. Then—another glimpse, blurred and shifting uncertainly. Had there been two stripes, or one? Just as quickly the glimpse shifted again and was gone, washed away into nothing like a stick figure drawn in wet sand erased by the relentless, all-conforming surf, and slippery thought went with it.

I found I was staring up into blue-green eyes. Grant was smiling at me, and I could feel the dopey grin on my own face as we clung to each other, our bare chests slippery with what seemed like enough cum to lubricate all the parts on a Singapore-bound 747. I pushed up on my toes to give him a swift, deep-throated kiss, my tongues happy to be reunited with his vigorous cocklickers, however briefly. Then I dropped to my heels and looked around us.

The air was heavy with sultry layers of musk and spunk, though the brisk morning air was already moving through the store, like an ocean breeze after a storm. As I’d suspected there were actual puddles of cum on the smooth-tiled shop floor from the three hyperdicked, identical giants, as if their size reflected the same indifferent tendency of horses to leave deposits of bodily output behind—only in their case it was masses of messy, thickly viscous jizz they could not help but leave behind like signs of their passing. I grinned at the thought and, without letting go of Grant, addressed myself to the simmeringly angry four-armed force of nature who’d entered the shop almost exactly at the point of detonation.

“If you tell me where the mops and supplies are,” I offered, “I’ll help clean up and all.” It was a natural impulse for me. As the only child of checked-out parents, used to solitary pursuits and small-town jobs where I was often the only person on site for long, dolorous shifts of nothing and no one at all, I’d learned early on that the only way I’d have a well-ordered environment was to take care of it myself.

The young Arab daddy was still glowering with the ferocity of an angry silverback at the four-man unit up front that seemed to have started all of this: the two sheepish-looking giant twins, the happy-happy blond muscle stud, and the lanky auburn hunk with the smug half-smile like he was the secret antihero whose schemes had all gone exactly to plan and then some. I was pretty sure these last two were customers, regulars maybe from their comfort level in the store not employees, but that hairy death glare seemed aimed at the four of them together like a beat cop in an old black-and-white short stink-eyeing his favorite pack of mischief-making ne’er-do-wells. I could kind of feel his ember-hot disgruntlement, like it was there in the shop with us. Actually all of the emotions in the room seemed palpable somehow, as if the heady mix of anger, contentment, chagrin, and anticipation was physically present, sifting potently through the air around us along with the warm fizz of lingering afterglow.

“That’s all right, kid,” the Arab daddy said, his burning stare still fixed on the troublemaking foursome. If shooting fire from your eyes was a real thing I’d be checking the muscle foursome for scorch marks. “The employees will take care of it.”

I grinned—for some reason I was weirdly amused by his bathos-like umbrage. “Please?” I pressed, my midwestern geniality at full throttle. “I’d really like to.”

“I’ll help too,” Grant put in. “If you have some rags, I can wipe down any… surfaces that need it.” One of the foursome snorted a short laugh. Apart from the shop floor most of what was covered in spend was bare, hard-chiseled torsos, all of them at various levels of development ranging from “nice” (mine, mainly) to “fuck yeah” to “holy shit.” I exchanged a knowing glance with my new orgasm-buddy and briefly toyed with the idea of swapping post-sex-bomb clean-up roles with him.

Mr. Hairy Death Glare sighed. His lips were pressed tight in a long, hard line so it came out through his nose, all explosive and testy. “Fine,” he growled, then unfolded his impressive arms and pointed a finger at the four men. “But you are all on my shit list.” Then he turned and jabbed his finger at the third giant, the one he’d come in with. “You as well,” he hissed, before storming out through the front doors of the shop toward his truck, the shop bell clanging loudly behind him.

“What did I do?” the third giant asked, staring after him in adorable confusion.

The eight-foot, massively-pectoraled, double-hyperwanged specimen who’d come in with Mr. Hairy Death Glare gave me and Grant a broad, cock-hardening grin and said, “Come with me.” Gladly, I thought. With an arm around the waist of my extra-tall handyman hunk I trailed after this vision of extreme masculinity toward a side door in the back of the shop, more or less ignoring the foursome, who’d gone back to sharing languid kisses like their brains were stuck above all else on the primacy of proximity and contact in as many forms as possible.

The side door turned out to be a very large supply closet, and our guide—he said his name was Rex—told us to go nuts. I smiled. “So this is your back room, huh?” I said. “Not how I pictured it.” Though, now that my mind was in the getter, there was definitely room for two or three people to have some fun, though if one of them was an eight-foot giant it might get a little cramped. Maybe that was what Mr. Hairy Death Glare had meant about satisfying their “needs” somewhere other than the actual shop floor.

“Brat,” Rex shot back good-naturedly. He was pretty relaxed, in that way I’d seem before where someone who used to be all walled up has finally discovered how to let his hair down.

The “back room” in question was extensively stocked with all kinds of shit, including extra inventory, sales support incidentals (shopping bags, boxes of preprinted loyalty cards, that kind of thing), and cleaning supplies including new-looking string mops, a yellow commercial mop bucket with that upper mezzanine part you can use to wring the mop out in, brooms, cleansers, and so on. There was also a custodial sink and a hose, so I half-filled the yellow bucket with warm water, added some lemon Pine-Sol (a contradiction in terms if you ask me, but nevermind), grabbed a mop, and was ready to rock.

In lieu of cleaning rags Rex handed Grant some thirsty-looking brick-red Hashery tee shirts, size S and XS it looked like, to wipe us all down with. Most of the branded merch was selling great, it seemed—Hashery weed-buyers liked supporting the store, often enthusiastically—but he said tee shirt sales had been falling off a bit lately for some reason, especially in the smaller, slimmer sizes, so they had a bit of overstock. As he said this he looked us both over with a very deliberate smirk, like maybe the shortfall might be partially owing to, well, customers like Grant and me who didn’t wear much of anything up top (not that he or his bros were any less topless than we were). Honestly he didn’t seem too put out by our acute thyrsovestiphobia. Maybe he didn’t mind having a big-muscled shirt-hating clientele too much… and I could certainly see his point. I’d be willing to bet they didn’t order the smaller sizes much anymore, anyway.

Rex started up a playlist over the store speakers—something jazzy and upbeat I didn’t recognize—and we got to work. Grant started by wiping me down first, paying extra attention to getting the cooling, partially dried cum out of the barely-there line of almost-invisible chest-hair between my pecs. Then he worked his way down, progressing to the thin, equally almost notional trail riding the narrow isthmus between my ripping abs behind my long, navel-high cocks, which were still crazy-hard somehow thanks to carnal radiation still flooding the place, just like the much heftier rods Grant had pressed against his tanned, fuzzy abs. Once he was done I made a move to reciprocate, hoping to progress from a cloth-based form of clean-up to something a bit more oral, but he just lifted my chin and kissed me. Then he nodded toward the shop floor with a grin, tossing me a teasing “Get to work, soccer boy!” before heading over to the mischievous, smooch-obsessive foursome.

Rex followed me out to the shop floor with a tablet, saying he figured he might as well check some of the inventory on the shelves while dealt with the mess. We talked while we worked. I learned that the two regulars were Eric (the muscle god with the blond waterfall) and Henry (the lanky one with the smirk), and that the other two giants were called Lex and… Pex. That made me burst out in surprised laughter. “Really?” I said, pausing in mid-swab to glance up at him with an incredulous grin.

There was a bit of chagrin in his smile. “Strange things happen when you’re stoned.”

“I bet.” We both turned to look at him. Oddly, Rex seemed… uncertain about Pex, somehow, like he didn’t quite know what to make of him. Lex, too, but in a different way. I was an only child, so I had no frame of reference, but something about Rex seemed separate from the nearly-merged unity of Lex and Pex across the store from us. I should have found it strange, I guess, given that they were clearly identical triplets and must have known each other forever, but I was more curious about the subtle dissonance between the three of them than flummoxed by it.

The eerie thing was that they looked more exactly alike than actual twins or trips did. My best friends in middle school were twins and you could barely tell they were brothers, and my cousins Doris and Dora dressed alike and talked exactly the same way but still looked obviously different from each other; but these three, they were like literal copy-pastes of each other, down to the firm, deliciously lickable jawlines, or the hard spherical glutes stretching out the tight, endless body-hugging denim of their custom jeans, or the languid set of their wide, bulging shoulders, the exact shape of their bulky, ridiculously disproportionate pecs looming over their cobbled expanses of chiseled abs, like long honey-brown Bifrösts connecting the universes of pecs and groin. Heck, Rex and Pex were even wearing same edge-worn ball cap, with the green bill bent in the same aggressive U and, somehow, the exact same asphalt scuff, faint but clearly visible, marring the front panel fabric all the way on the left side near the stitching. They moved with fluid grace, like their size and proportions were the true human ideal, making me crave a night out clubbing with them, or just a few ridiculous TikTok videos of the three of them doing complicated dance steps to unlikely teenbop beats.

Then, too, there was the fact that beyond their uncanny physical resemblance to each other the three of them manifestly formed a kind of unique enclave when it came to the human race, even within the subtly exceptional range of Hashery-connected hotties, so you’d think that would have connected them more intimately to each other over their shared lifetimes than the closest of ordinary bros. Clearly it was more involved than all that, and I was finding myself more and more intrigued as we worked away in the munchies aisle, a little away from the group we’d just shared a spectacular orgasm with.

So, yeah. I wanted to know more about the undercurrents of their fraternal dynamic, but asking about it wasn’t me. I was too used to being disconnected and alone myself to really know how to talk to people about, well, anything important. Especially if I was horny for their leg-sized wangs. As Rex had already discovered back at the Burger Jack, my brain tends to flood with nothing but warm goo whenever someone like him turns up.

Once I had successfully taken care of the mess of cock effluvia nearest the main door—the stuff Rex himself had helplessly left behind when the sex-bomb hit us all—I continued mopping up the aisle toward the front of the store where the other cum-explosion had been. Mess Epicenter 2 was clear and in the open now, fortunately, the make-out foursome having moved down the sales desk with Grant now at the center of their little already-wiped-down muscle mob, trading deep, delirious kisses with the two regulars while Lex and Pex nuzzled his neck and ears from behind. At least I wouldn’t need to mop awkwardly around boots and sneakers standing in the mess, like a grumpy museum custodian forced to floor-polish around the sandaled feet of calloused gods and imperious heroes.

I was making sure to swab properly and efficiently, squeezing out and reloading the mop at intervals, humming tunelessly as I went. It didn’t occur to me to just do the two messes, though I was sure that was what they assumed I’d do. It didn’t make sense to mop just the spunk-smeared parts of the shop floor when I had the mop out anyway. I expected Rex to object and tell me I didn’t have to go to all the trouble, but I think he could tell I liked helping out. He kept pace with me, silently checking the shelves to confirm the available stock of multigrain chips and brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts matched whatever his tablet was telling him they should be. His perfect muscle butt swayed ever so slightly to the peppy instrumental jazz soundtrack swirling around our ankles like a soft morning mist as we moved, distracting me more in its own way than the full thrust of his extreme mesmeric beauty.

“I was surprised to see you here, Bill,” Rex said unexpectedly after a few moments of comparative silence, the only sounds other than the music being the cock-thrumming make-out noises of the foursome and their body-trapped prey. I paused my mopping and glanced up at Rex, but he wasn’t looking at me, his attention fixed on his tablet.

“Hmm,” I said, leaning on my mop and considering. “Bad surprised, or good surprised?”

He looked up from his tablet and grinned magnificently at me, setting my pulse thudding and making my upstanding hardons weep in appreciation. “Good surprised,” he confirmed, to my relief. I licked my lips, and his smile softened. It occurred to me belatedly that he’d been lingering near me as I mopped because he’d wanted to say this very thing.

He turned toward me so that he was fully facing me. The smooth, curved expanse of his heavy, cement-hard pecs vied to fill my vision, but his heavenly face and vivid chestnut-brown eyes were even more rewarding, firing my blood like his superpower was a heat that stole through the body vein by vein and artery by artery. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, his voice low and close, “but meeting you that day on the road, the two of us in an empty burger joint… somehow, it was exactly what I needed.”

I let out a breath, slightly shocked at how close he’d come to voicing my own thoughts. “Back atcha,” I said after a long moment, letting those very basic words encompass a lot of heady choices and feelings I wasn’t sure I could properly articulate. After a beat I added, “It’s, uh, kind of why I’m here.”

He stepped toward me then, our bodies moving closer like reality was contracting for our benefit. I was aware of every inch of him, his warm, looming presence tingling through my fingers, my lips, my unslakable balls. “Because… you were stalking me?” he teased, sliding a finger along my faintly stubbled jaw as the distance between us all but evaporated. I shivered, relishing the way the pleasure of his touch skittered through me.

He was joking, of course, and I could have responded in kind. Instead I met his gaze and said with utter honesty, “Because I knew, somehow, that I belonged… here.”

His smile this time was oddly tender, and I basked in it for a few very loud heartbeats before he bent and kissed me as though, in that moment, nothing was true but that we belonged to each other.

I was in a dark mood as I wrestled with the irrigation pump system behind the main greenhouse. I may have even been muttering to myself. I don’t like situations that aren’t under someone’s control, preferably mine, and it was getting my goat that whatever was happening at the Hashery was spiraling toward the earth like a jet with no engines and I couldn’t figure out any way to get things anywhere close to normal.

And I was the only one who could, because I was pretty sure I was the only person on site who knew the truth.

I saw Rex growing in the car. That was insane all by itself. And then we burst into the shop and it was like being at ground zero, only what happened was an explosion of muscle and cock and the primacy of sex above everything. And I knew. They didn’t bat an eye, but I knew. I knew Rex and Lex and Pex hadn’t always been eight-foot tall muscle gods with a double-helping of tree-trunk cock. Hell, I knew that there hadn’t been a Pex before reality started to spin like a centrifuge. I saw torsos stretch up like time-lapsed redwoods, I saw pecs swell and junk balloon from knee-kissers to floor-draggers. Hell, I saw that kid’s shirt vanish off his body like the tight fabric had melted into the sex-drenched air just before we all came like guests at Caligula’s Saturnalia, exposing a hard torso and even harder erections shoving up out of trousers, as friendly and routine as a fistbump.

And I knew, I knew that I had never, ever been the guy with four beast-strong arms and the permanent hardons too wide to even suck properly. I knew, and yet they all looked at me like that was who I was, and it felt so normal I didn’t even register the full extend of the jarring canyon between what made sense and this place, this altered reality where were all were now. I had four fucking arms—arms that felt as right as, well, as being shirtless and angry-aroused all the damn time.

So I verbally shitposted the lot of them, instantly grokking that their acceptance of the changes had dissolved into pure unawareness, and stormed out. Around the corner I fell back against the wall of the house, sorting frantically through what I knew. I reviewed what I’d seen over the last two years, then the last two days, then the last two hours. Slow progression, then escalation, then, suddenly, radical transformation.

Slow progression felt like Thad. I knew Thad. But Thad had left the building. For all I knew he was at his brother’s for good, and this shitshow was mine to deal with all on my own.

The escalation? That felt like Rex. And Lex, too, I guessed. Honestly what it reminded me of is Aleksei. Aleksei would have gone there. But Aleksei was MIA, too, though something about that was niggling at the back of my brain, the idea waiting to emerge until it was ripe enough and ready.

This sudden insanity—that didn’t feel like Thad, or Aleksei. Or Rex or Pex or Googleplex or whoever. Someone… someone had seen this door being pulled ajar and had not only yanked it open, they’d ripped it off its fucking hinges, letting the angry torrent that was trapped beyond flood through all at once like a thousand chaotic cum-demons to wash us all into the Ludicrous Dimension.

And where from here? Stability? Show change, like I was used to around here? Or was there more radicalness ahead, waiting to pounce? It was funny to me that slow change was what made sense… like human history was all about getting incrementally more hung and nicely ripped over the course of a few years, and the shock now was only when it came all at once, like a singular mind had recklessly unleashed eldritch powers previously known only to sift and seep with a bit of chemical help from my missing boss’s carefully-bred mind-unlocking cannabis.

I had to at least see where I was at. A plan would be next, but first, facts.

I pulled out my wallet. Driver’s license: angry, shirtless, two fucking sets of hairy, hard pecs. Fuck. I checked the pics on my phone. Every damn pic. Me with Thad, Thad looking hot but like I remembered, me shirtless and extraed, like that was thing. I swiped down, digging through more pics. Me with my parents and siblings at my little brother’s wedding—for fuck’s sake, my four-armedness was fucking genetic. Everyone in my family and all my dad’s relations looked like some kind of hairy hard-muscled Arab deity sculpted by a guy with too much marble and big love of arms.

Fuck.

My brain works better when I’m using my hands, I told myself. As I stalked off toward the greenhouses, I snorted. If working with my hands helps me think, I should be a fucking genius.

An hour later I’d fury-fixed five things I’d had on my list for a month, but hadn’t gotten any further with figuring things out, when I heard someone approaching. I looked up to see Rex striding toward me over the lawn, his arm draped around the guy with the nice legs whose shirt had done the disappearing act right on front of my face. “Hey, Amirs,” Rex called, all genial, like prodigiously-junked giants like him and extra-armed beasts like me were as mundane as sunshine and roses.

I straightened up with my other body, too, and glared at him, arms crossed, with both. “Just ‘Amir’,” I corrected him with a growl, and even without remembering this reality I was sure it wouldn’t have been for the first time.

That had been my other shock. I’d felt it like a last wave of the reality bomb that had come with our massive multiplayer orgasm explosion, like a final kick in the nuts to the truth of things before the potency of the release ebbed and normality was recast in utter permanence again, and in that moment, slipping backwards into the past, I’d left half of me behind when I went to the store with Rex (because pickup truck cabs are not meant for three manly men).

It threw me for how out of left field it was. Rex and his two identical “brothers” all had very different personalities—I could sense that, somehow, even beyond what I’d actually seen since everything had a shade weirder the night of the big storm. Me, I just had two bodies. Two bodies with the abnormal complement of pecs and arms and ox-like strength, that is… and of course the never-softening dual throatchokers I now had to deal with twenty-four seven. If nothing else, I could be grateful I didn’t remember high school in this reality and the puerile locker room jokes that must have been an everyday thing. At least handling the two meat suits and dealing with multiplied sensory input was second-nature somehow, as if I’d been born knowing how to do it and honed these skills over the last 37 years. The last thing I would have needed today was trying to hunt down YouTube tutorials on how to deal with suddenly having an extra me walking around.

Rex came up and stood in front of me, beaming. The kid, for his part, looked small and pale next to Rex, though he was nicely built in his own right and very, very cute. His expression was uncertain, his gaze darting nervously between my two matching scowls. I crossed my arms in that dramatic way I had, and he quailed a little, pressing against Rex.

Rex ignored this performance of mine, as though he had known me for ages and knew I was a pussycat. “So, I got a new hire for you,” he said, nodding down at the smaller man. “Amir Hassan, meet Bill Stubbins.”

Bill Stubbins twisted his mouth in a weak smile and offered a tentative hand. I took it with a random hand of my own, keeping the rest of my arms crossed. Bill gulped, and I had to take pity on him, a bit. “Sorry,” I told him, aware I was still scowling. With a sharp glance up at Rex’s face I added, “It’s been a difficult day.” How I said that without gritting my teeth I was not sure.

Rex had the grace to look slightly guilty—he knew he had a role in fucking my life up, though he clearly had no idea by how much. “Do you want me to set him up on the payroll system, or—?” he offered, but I cut him off.

“We’ve had enough explosions today,” I said flatly. I turned by gaze on Bill. “I hope you know what you’re signing up for,” I warned him.

He must have caught the wry note in my voice, because he grinned and said, “Can’t wait to get started.”

“I want to try something.”

I looked up lazily from where I was sprawled in the soft, spongy grass, Eric’s head resting on my chest as I stroked his long, fast-growing flaxen hair. We were up in the idyllic little woodland behind and upland from the Hashery not far from the isolated snuggly cottage where the Amirs lived, lazing bonelessly (more or less) on the slopes that ringed a tiny, forgotten mountain lake that was just starting to reflect the stars pricking through the darkening sky, the western horizon still brimming red beyond the trees. Pex and Lex were with us, nestled in close on either side of us like eight-foot muscle-hunk bookends, their adorable German shepherd doggo-ears flicking occasionally with the passing breeze. The four of us were together like this a lot. The two identical giants hadn’t moved in with me and Eric yet, but I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time. It made us ache inside for the four of us not to be together and physically close, and who needed that? It was a lot simpler just to be together.

It wasn’t quite what I’d intended when I’d slid us down this bizarre, impromptu left-turn reality tube two weeks back, on the single most awesome day the universe had ever experienced… so far. I didn’t mind, though. I didn’t mind at all. I had to think more about how all this had worked, though. The superweed high we’d all had that day had us transcending the mundane world and feeling… something more sublime, like there was this infinite reservoir of inhuman power that changed us in small ways just from us brushing up against it. That was what Eric and I had been feeling for years, I realized. When we were high on Hashery weed we caught a taste of that tingly beyond-power, microscopic tendrils of it seeping into us an ever so slightly improving us with every fucking toke. Only that day, the day the four of us connected, it was… more, deeper. Like, the difference between strolling down the beach and smelling the sea air, letting the faintly damp, salty taste of it into your lungs, and being shoved into the ocean and finding out you have gills and can’t fucking get enough, like you’re Poseidon’s bastard and it filled and saturated every part of you.

The weird thing was, that hadn’t come from us getting high together. I’d thought at first that was it, the power of four, like we were the Charmed sisters only recast as four ridiculously horny guys with lots of muscle and unstoppable cocks. But I remembered the feel of that life-changing high like it had imprinted itself on my marrow. I had felt our four centers of being in the warm effervescence of the beyond-power we’d passed into, and one of them had been, I dunno, on the same wavelength, the exact resonance of the beyond. I wasn’t sure of identities at the time—we were all merging together—but afterwards I knew it was Lex. He was the one that unlocked it. He had slit open the membrane and flooded us with the beyond… and he didn’t seem to be aware of it, or know that I had taken hold of that power and, in my intoxicated state, broken down all my barriers and shoved us down a reality-tube that should not have even existed.

Even now Lex was blatantly oblivious to the fact that we’d all radically and retroactively changed that day, having always been what I had just shaped us into becoming. All of the crew were. I was the only one, apparently. So… what did all this mean? If I was right, then Lex was the Poseidon-bastard, not me, if there was a Poseidon of the beyond-ocean of mutable realities we’d all found when we were superweed stoned. He was the link, but he somehow didn’t know it. Which meant what for me and my anomalous awareness? Was it just that I had the perception and the will to steer the change, more than anyone else? Like, Lex had the keys to the universe-shifting Caddy, but I was the only one of us who could still drive when we were all so stoned out of our minds.

Another thought had occurred to me. If Lex was the Poseidon-bastard, what about his triplet brothers? Lex, Pex, and Rex were physically identical—that much was obvious—but I was pretty confident only Lex was truly attuned to the beyond. He was the one person able to get us there when we were supercannabis blissed and give us real access. Anyway, when it came to the trips, everything I had sensed from them told me they were three very different people. Maybe Pex was more like Rex, in how his emotions felt at least, but… I dunno, Pex was… I couldn’t quite figure him out. Who the heck was Pex?

These were the kinds of thoughts drifting through my mind as we all lay there, basking in the night air by the happy little lake. We were smoking weed, of course, one of the Hashery’s more mundane blends (though still a lot more intense than anything you’d get on the street from your buddy’s brother-in-law’s ex-girlfriend’s cousin with the beat-up truck and the taco obsession), and our four intertwined souls were wafting in gentle arcs and curls over the smooth, still surface of the lake like the very picture of simple, low-key bliss. I thought I’d enjoyed marijuana before, but my previous excursions into the soft, friendly, ultimately ephemeral mental dissociation I experienced under its care, alone or with Eric next to me sharing joints and feeling close, were nothing on what it was like when your core being was entwined with three other souls and you felt a strong semblance of what they were feeling, even more so with a health pot-high widening the connection. It was like, instead of being in the middle of one tornado it was four tornados in one place, all of them thrashing us all at once with pure, subcellular comfort and just enough wild, chaotic gratification to stir the blood and make us want this forever. We were all half-clothed and hard as fuck, but there was no need to do anything about it just now. The longer we were high and horny together, hanging out and banking our slowly building pleasure, the better the ultimate eruptions would be.

My mind sort of caught up with the present, and connected with what had just been spoken. Right. Wanting to try something. Kind of vague, I thought. I should inquire further.

“What do you want to try?” I asked Pex—he was the one that had spoken.

Pex hesitated, like he was trying to figure out how exactly to frame his proposal. I watched him closely, my head resting on one of the folded-up towels we’d brought with us for this little jaunt in the gloaming and then tended to forget about. Pex didn’t talk much, and he acted almost like an outsider compared to his clone-identical brothers, like Rex and Lex belonged here but he didn’t. I caught occasional curls of unease from him sometimes, but our empathic connection, while amazing at sharing physical sensations and general emotions, didn’t let me into his thoughts and memories deep enough to see what was making him feel disconnected.

Well, we all had secrets we wanted to protect—even my happy-go-lucky, extra-extroverted BFF Eric, probably. My gut told me that whatever this proposed “thing” was, it was about Pex’s lingering sense of alienation, and what he wanted to do about it.

Pex’s doggo ears twitched, and he licked his lips. My weed-fuzzed attention drifted to his sexy mouth and machete-sharp jawline. Neither he nor his brothers ever seemed grow much more than stubble on their chiseled jaws, I’d noticed. And their massive pecs and upper torsos were completely hairless, until you hit the deliciously thin treasure trail leading down to their leg-sized cocks and ridiculous balls. Funny how chest hair was so variable in our group, Amir had enough chest hair to cover the whole upper township.

Pex was actually speaking, I realized, and I managed to home in on his words. “I was recently in the company of a small cluster of guys who were… linked like we are,” he said slowly, seeming to choose his words so as to leave out any kind of context. I could tell from our link that he was worried about saying too much, but I had no idea what kind of information he was leaving out. Who were these “guys”? Was this “cluster” bound to each other through premium-strain Hashery weed and, well, mischievous intent like we were? That seemed likely, and that’s sort of what it felt like empathically; but critical something about the identity and/or the circumstances was being held back.

Interestingly I sensed surprise from Lex on my other side—this guy-cluster was news to Pex’s brother. Nice.

I realized that the dangerous entropy of the situation was turning me on, perverse fucker that I was, and I was throbbing wetly against my abs. “Go on,” I nudged, holding back an incubus grin with rather less success than I might have if I’d been unimpaired from three hours of solid pot-smoking mixed with occasional shotgun-style make-outs.

Pex frowned slightly at me but continued. “When I came up here,” he said, “to the Hashery, it was with the goal of—I mean, I love having this crazy body,” he interrupted himself, “but it’s not what I actually look like.”

Eric snorted and drew a long toke. “Sure looks like that’s what you look like,” he said with perfect stoner logic, then giggled, letting the smoke out, so that it came out in little puffs rather than a long stream.

Pex gave us a half smile. He had rolled onto his side and propped his head up with his left hand, causing the massive bicep to bunch in a way that would probably keep his arm from bending much further toward his boulder-like shoulders. “It’s not what I used to look like,” he amended.

I watched Pex curiously, trying to get a handle on what he was saying. Was this about… that day? We’d all changed, but I was sure none of the others had realized it. Everyone acted like they’d always been the way they were. Even for me, the memories of the current reality were so strong, I had to consciously rummage in my brain for echoes of what it had been like before the change. The others didn’t even have that. Their lives had been completely retconned by my little twist in our lifelines—not only memories but old pictures, government records, and the normality of them being the way they now appeared to be.

It was kind of thrilling to think about. I felt a sudden, reckless rush. I wanted to feel it again, and even my own fear, the dread of fucking up the universe, was so hot I wanted to cum so hard I almost nutted right there and then.

But—no, Pex had said—what had he said? He said he had come here wanting to do this, to revert to his old body or whatever. So this wasn’t the universe-flip I’d made. This wasn’t about that day. Something else had forced a change onto my guy Pex here, before that. And it felt and sounded like he had finally worked up the nerve to get past how amazing it was to be a horny, unbearably handsome, eight-foot-tall twin-hyper-cocked muscle giant and try to ctrl-Z his original unwanted transformation. Pex’s changes on the day we met must have been retconned along with everyone else’s—the increase in his pec mass, the growing and doubling of his leg-sized dicks, that kind of thing—but apparently that only went back to the last big whole-body change that had been imposed onto him via supercannabis gestalt fuckery. Interesting.

Lex had also rolled onto his side, head propped up to mirror Pex, an amused, pot-intoxicated smile on his face. “So,” he said to Pex, “you want to be… ‘normal’ again? ‘Cause I sure don’t.”

I huffed a laugh, taking the joint from Eric and sucking in a long drag. None of us were exactly ‘normal’ at this point. I was built and beautiful like a runway model, if runway models came in a flavor that included being a stretched-up 6-foot-10 and possessed of two 17-inch torpedo-thick boners that never wanted to get soft and could barely be separated, so it was like having a single massive double-headed wang you could slide your tongue down the middle of if you wanted. My guy Eric was a rippling, thick-muscled, long-haired superstud, shorter than me but with door-wide shoulders and a brace of extra-wide 14-inch dicks even more tireless than mine were. They both bent a little like boomerangs and, let me tell you, that fat bend felt impossibly awesome shoved down your throat—or up your ass. Plus there were his two talented tongues, super-long and diabolically flexible, and… yeah, those things also felt amazing in your throat and/or ass.

The triplets—well, it went without saying. They were actually metahuman in size and in their uncanny, alluring attractiveness, not to mention the cocks, the disproportionate pecs, and the big, sexy-cute canine ears. They were stunning in ever way and across every delectable surface.

What would that be like? Being that big, that hung, that mesmerically arousing? I had to admit I was curious.

And that wasn’t even taking into account the others, like Amir with his extra arms and the wildness of his having his two bodies… though I was convinced it was still the stacked, fur-covered pecs people tended to notice before anything else. Even the new kid, Bill, had gotten retroactively boosted with a healthy dose of yummy, lickably firm muscle, long twin cocks, long twin tongues, and of course our collective habitual shirtlessness. Not that he or the others knew anything different on any of those counts.

Pex’s smile twisted into a slightly secretive smirk. “I… wasn’t completely normal before, either,” he admitted. I’ll bet, I thought.

Then to the group he added, “What do you say? I want to do this, but we all have to, you know, join in together.” He looked between us expectantly, feeling out our gut responses.

“I’m in,” Eric slurred comfortably, sound veeeery stoned. “I want to see you morph.” He laughed, and then all at once he was cumming spontaneously just from how hot the idea of Pex morphing was. The hot torrent of his sweet, sweet orgasm flooded instantly through all of us, an unstoppable force of pure euphoric power, and then we were all cumming helplessly, reveling in our multiplied pleasure. I bent and started kissing Eric, just because cumming was always better when we could all feel Eric’s double tongues dancing with someone else’s. We kept blowing our loads for a while, and it felt like the physical substance of the world was sort of melting into a steady-state universe of uncomplicated ecstasy, taking us with it, into the inhuman beyond.

We drifted through this sea for a long time before slowly returning to our spunk-covered forms sprawled out by the lake, wallowing in our own pleasure under the infinite stars, the beyond still lapping at our toes. Eric had his head on my chest again—he was barely conscious, though I could feel through our bond that he was as aroused and excited as ever. Lex and Pex both looked languid to the point of liquid, and I was feeling that, too, in stereo from both of them. Good thing Pex had only wanted to change his physical form—none of us wanted to give up this amazing multiplication of physical pleasure and emotional euphoria.

“I’m in, too,” I mumbled belatedly, lying back and closing my eyes so I could focus on the connections linking our intertwined souls. “What do we need to do?”

“Don’t we need the pot?” asked Lex. He giggled. “I mean, the special pot?”

I felt Pex grin triumphantly, even though my eyes were closed. “You’re smoking it,” he said, like he was in an old commercial for dishwashing liquid or something. He was speaking very disconnectedly—the superweed high was getting to him. “I brought it. The strain we needed. The last joint I rolled.”

My pulse picked up. I tried to hide my excitement, though I’m not sure how well I succeeded. This was it. Hadn’t I just been thinking I wanted to feel it again? The thrill of driving someone’s change? And all the things I had been wondering about…

Without saying another word I focused all my stoned attention on our twisted connection, feeling for the threads of change like I had that day two weeks ago.

My consciousness filled with a loose, yet strangely detailed awareness of our physical shapes. I could see/feel all of us—me, Eric, Lex, Pex. Show me, I thought at Pex. He’d asked for corporeal change—what did he want? Show me, I thought, nudging the connection. Show us, Lex and Eric thought, echoing me, our invitation swirling like ribbons around us. Only mine was a ruse, but I was holding that back. I knew what I wanted, and the others were so high, so transported from cum and metacannabis, it felt like this would be even easier than last time.

A faint image came from Pex. It was unsubstantial because he couldn’t seem to decide how tall and beefy he was, like it was fluctuating between various stages of past growth. I peered at the image, frowning mentally. It looked… it looked a lot like like… Thad? But the image shifted, shying away momentarily, and then when it came back it wasn’t Thad, but sort of like him, maybe lankier, still fluctuating a little in height and tight, defined muscle and an enticingly crafty expression. Thad’s hotter brother?

Not that it mattered. The others grasped for the shifting image, caressing it with their thoughts. Then I took control of the flow of change, and the others, blissed out and utterly at peace as they were, let me. It felt like we were half-detached from our bodies in this state anyway, so it was absurdly easy to do what I had planned. When I felt the shift complete I was so proud of myself, so turned on, that I came, and of course we all came then, so hard that we blacked out, still blasting.

When I came to, a very familiar face was glaring at me.

The oceans of the beyond had receded, and the night with it. We were back languishing by the lake, more or less sober and (as we often were) covered in cum. The morning sun was already up over the trees, making the scene look very different from the twilight of the night before: now it was all vivid, full color realism instead of the sultry blues and silvers of the lakeside eve.

Eric and Lex were still asleep, their hard double-cocks pulsing with dreams I could half feel through our entwined bond. It was just us.

“Problem, handsome?” I asked the man occupying my long, lanky, russet-haired body. I felt my doggo ears twitch, and grinned. Awesome.

Dark blue eyes stared daggers at me. “This is not what I meant,” he said. He sounded both vexed and perplexed, like a dad whose toddler had brought him a car engine when he’d asked for the remote.

I clambered to my feet, almost staggering as I adjusted to the much greater mass and higher center of gravity I now possessed. Fuck, these leg-sized cocks were even heavier than they looked, especially stiff. They didn’t lift very high when they were fully hard, so they sort of projected outward, and I had to think about how I’d need to walk as I contemplated padding down to the lake to check the water temperature. I hadn’t changed anything about Pex’s body (now my body)—no wait, I had. I had totally retconned the change, too. No pants. Thanks to our combined, supercannabis-unlocked mindlinked power as directed by my dastardly and superior force of will, none of the triplets wore pants, or had ever worn pants. Well, really, what was the point of wearing jeans, even specially-engineered “four-legged” ones, if your hard-ons were the size of an actual smallish person?

It did mean that people tended to grab them and stroke them super-casually wherever the three giants went, as I now (retroactively) knew; but given their—our!—hypnotic attractiveness it was had to blame anyone for that.

“Henry—!” Pex-in-my-body growled, though I noticed it was now mostly a playful growl, like he was already getting used to the change.

“Call me ‘Pex,’” I said airily, still eyeing the lake and wondering if I wanted to risk it, or just find a hose to pressure-wash the cum off. Then something occurred to me and I turned around to face him with a wicked grin, almost slapping him and the still snoozing Eric with my wet, four-foot boners ion the process. “By the way, it’s ‘your’ birthday tomorrow,” I said, my tone teasing. He narrowed his eyes, picking up on my mischievous mood through our bond. “‘Your’ dads have a big day planned, I hear. Should be interesting!” I singsonged.

Giving up on the lake as almost certainly being too cold, I turned on my heel and headed up the hill instead, toward the little trail that led back to the Hashery. As I walked I felt Pex’s half-serious ire melt into amused exasperation. “You fucker,” he said to my back, chuckling, before shifting his attentions to the others. “C’mon, sluggards, rise and shine. We gotta get cleaned up and—” Then I felt the sensation through our bond of a drowsy, still half-blissed Eric pulling him in, and then him and Pex-in-my-body making out, deep and slow the way Eric loved to do with his best friend. The flood of empathic sensation and stimulation washed deliriously through my own mouth and body, jazzing me up and making my cocks, somehow, even harder.

Man, these things felt good hard. Heavy as a pair of dump trucks, but so good. I was going to enjoy this. The party would be fun, too. Bill would be there. I liked Bill. We all kind of missed him when he wasn’t around, so it was good there was going to be a big get-together where everyone would hang out and have a blast, “Pex” included.

Thinking of my body-swap victim as Pex-in-my-body was a little awkward, though. Huh, I mused. If he’s Pex in my body, does that make him… Hex?

Okay, maybe I’m still a little stoned.

I laughed, glad of the bright new day and the feelings of pleasure coursing through me, even as the gears in my mind turned and I half-consciously wondered what kinds of fun I could have pretending to be Pex… and what I could change next.

Despite wanting to get away by myself to figure things out, I ended up spending a good half an hour making out with Eric while Lex dozed lazily next to us, because… man, kissing Eric Sanderson was nothing short of addictive. It wasn’t just the basic fact that he had two pleasantly long, slightly stretchy tongues, or that he was a wall of muscle that felt really astonishingly good under your hands and pressed up hard against you. It was that Eric threw himself into pleasure. When he made out with you, he was all in, fully focused on you and the all-consuming awesomeness of full, wet, eager lips moving against each other, of tongues wrestling playfully in the warm heat of a closely shared mouthspace, of bodies pressed against each other on the soft sweetgrass of a long lakeside slope where every little shift of leg against leg and chest against chest and exposed erection against exposed erection subtly amplified and heightened the flow of profound carnal pleasure. 

It was like every part of his body was assigned to the task of creating deeply shared, mutual, endlessly perpetuating kiss-ecstasy. It wasn’t just his strong palms and fingers sliding slowing across my bare back or firmly cupping my glutes through my beat-up old jeans; it was his biceps rubbing against my arm as he held me, his tree-trunk thighs moving languidly against mine, even the pants-protruding upper halves of his his thick, precum-gooey boomerang-bent cocks writhing and testing against my own rigid, nestled pair that made it as fully engrossing for me as much as it was for him. Hell, just the way his shoulders pressed deftly into mine, his cannonball delts making slow, infinitesimal moves that felt like a long, slow time-lapse dance against my not-so-muscled but very willing flesh, was enough to keep my engine revving for untold amounts of time. 

The impression I had gotten was that Eric was a cuddler even back when he and Henry were just friends, and I could see it working for him. I wished I’d had had friends like that. Spending all your together-time snuggling your bodies together as you down slices and beer together or binge your way through an endearingly extra-corny j-drama romcom. Sure, you’d be hard all the time, but so what? That’s only to be expected, and if you had to jerk off in the bathroom every so often before returning to the big, cozy couch and diving back into his comfortable, nuzzling embrace, well, with someone like Eric you could laugh about that, too. Even without his weird, slightly mysterious reality-steering gift, my man Henry had it good just being inseparable best buds with this extra-cute, thick-muscled, endlessly exuberant, mono-task-fixated pleasure beast. 

I thought back to my own past. Back when I was Thad Loukanis I’d been too absorbed in my studies to have fun. I’d had nothing like Eric, nothing like a long-term physical presence next to me. Heck, I’d actively repelled such comforts as a distraction. Look at Chet, my grad-school roommate. He’d been right there, ready to be an Eric to me, but I was too busy with plant breeding charts and covert botanical raids to let myself have anything like that. Hell, the moment we experienced any real imtimacy I was out the door. The only thing that had mattered to me in my feverish, hyper-goal-oriented state was the way our coming together, as it were, had unlocked the process of supercannabis physical mutation I spent the next several years testing and perfecting. And, yeah, the intimacy had spooked me, more than I was ready to admit. 

Those days, I’d ached with regret now and then at abandoning Chet, but I’d been certain it was a necessary sacrifice. No question. Now? I didn’t regret what I’d achieved, but it was transparently clear to me that the empty isolated life of the secret genius cannabis innovator I’d so carefully built for myself, Colorado’s own mad scientist of hash, wasn’t quite as fulfilling as I’d expected.

My recent past wasn’t any less cringeworthy. I’d had a shot with Aleksei, so I’d kept myself at arm’s length, deliberately toeing the distant just-the-boss role to keep from getting involved with my boyishly mischievous Russian business manager and his meaty ten-inch tool. Even Amir had given me a smoldering look or two over the years, and if I’d pressed it I could have made something very fiery and intense happen between us. But… no. Even at my brother’s this summer I’d tried to keep myself separate and aloof, above the others’ reckless shenanigans, until I was unwillingly dragged into the mud with the rest of them. Hell, my most meaningful intimate encounter in the last year was the one-night stand with Bill on the way home from Mike’s.

Now, in this moment, all of that felt like a past life. Memories of another existence. Because I wasn’t Thad Loukanis. Not anymore.

That thought had been eating at me ever since I’d come into being as “Pex,” a clone of Rex/Thad suddenly conjured into existence by Lex’s building infatuation, lost as he was in the escalating febrile heat of pot-intoxicated abandon as he’d fused the erotic empathic connection with Henry and Eric—little knowing how much trouble that would cause. 

But I was finally coming to believe that my chronic existential crisis had one firm answer. I wasn’t Thad.

Hell, Thad wasn’t even Thad. I mean… and that’s leaving aside that Thad’s actual body was still back at Mike’s, with a copy of Mike in it (long story). When Thad had come home it wasn’t even in his body—he was in a modified version of Zac’s body, which Zac had vacated in order to merge with his OTL, Jay (again, long story). That same body, a bit expanded and augmented, was how I had come into this world, as Pex. 

Then a certain mischief-demon decided to impishly swap places with me just to stir up trouble and play around being an irresistible sex giant, so now here I was in a third body, Henry’s. Well, second for me, third for my memories, I guess.

But that was the crux of it. Maybe it was easier to contemplate now that I was in a more “normal” body like I’d wanted rather than walking around as an anomalous, existential-crisis-fueling leg-dicked giant. (I’d offered Mike’s as a model to the others, since Thad’s would’ve given too much away, but Henry’s was fine—I just hadn’t expected to literally get Henry’s actual body, with him moving out and everything.) The fact was that those really were someone else’s memories, not mine. 

I wasn’t Thad. And who I was—well, the fact that I didn’t know, couldn’t that be a good thing? I mean, this was my chance, right? A chance to have a life, not as an obsessive scientist who spreads incremental muscle and cock out into the world for others to enjoy, but as a living, flesh and blood person. That was what Mike’s crowd of hedonistic body-morphers were trying to show me, I think, in their admittedly extreme and unpredictable fashion, and I was dense enough that the lesson was only now sinking in. 

My past was fluid and changeable, and the only thing I could be certain of was the present. As the Doctor once said to Rose, this is who I am, right here, right now. (Huh, never expected a story about the end of the world to be so relevant…)

I realized Eric was watching me curiously, his light sepia eyes somehow enhanced by the waves of long, fast-growing sunlit flaxen hair framing his cute, lightly freckled face. Eric didn’t know what had happened. He thought I was still Henry, and something in his patient expression told me that he was used to his more introverted buddy getting lost in thought for a moment or two. 

I held his bewitching gaze, my nuzzling Henry-cocks twitching against his fat boomerangs. He shifted, subtly but suggestively, and with snap of raw pleasure my blood heated just a bit more. I felt so flooded with desire, so full of need it might have been shining from my eyes, and, for all I knew, lubing up my ass, too.

Who was I? Right now I was the guy kissing this guy, sweet, sexy, reality-augmented Eric Sanderson, and that was all I fuckin’ needed to be. I moved in, signaling my eagerness for more, and as my coppery stubbled chin brushed against his softer blond bristles I felt his grin against my lips. Our mouths sealed and my tongue slid in, questing for its favoritest playmates in the whole world.

Lex and Eric both had work that afternoon. Lex’s gig was here at the Hashery manning the sales counter in place of the supposedly missing Aleksei, taking over from Bill. Our newest recruit had picked up a lot of the day shifts, slotting into the place like there’d been a Bill-shaped gap in our lives this whole time. 

I knew that in the “beforetimes” Eric and Henry had worked the deli counter at the MyWay! superstore, but the reality shift that had given us extra cocks and an inability to don any form of shirt-like attire had also silently slid Eric sideways into a long-held and much-loved job as one of the more popular of the cheery-faced, hot-bodied bartenders at a gay dance club in town called Mystake, a typically jammin’ and sweaty twunk-filled nightly destination that turned out to be actually pretty wholesome in spite of its lurid advertising (mostly blue-tinted threesome make-outs on the boy-packed dance floor, overlaid with the slogan, “Go home with all the wrong guys”). A lot of the Hashery’s regulars frequented the place, I’d heard, naturally upping its reputation for guaranteed bodywatching and an extra-friendly clientele.

Which left me to my own devices for the rest of the evening, I guessed. For all I knew Henry still toiled away at the MyWay! deli slicing piles of extra-lean lunch meat and low-sodium cheese for ungrateful Karens; but I was the one in Henry’s body today and no one had told me I needed to be anywhere, so fuck ‘em. 

Henry himself, in my old “Pex” body, was off somewhere away from the Hashery—I could sort of feel distance and direction in a very vague way, but our empathic bond only told me he was smugly content at the moment, not what he was up to. Our four-way link was great during pot-infused sexy-times, overlaying and interlacing our intoxicated sybaritic pleasure with the drug-infused sensations of the others so that our sense of self was drowned in dark, euphoric libidinous communion. With the four of us lucid and not actually making love, the bond was basically mood ring with a drunk GPS.

I idly wandered the cool, fragrant forest paths without direction, which seemed apt. I was aware of myself as myself regardless of what body I was in (and who knew how permanent or temporary my sojourn as Henry would be, given how much Henry seemed to like being Pex so far). Being my own me meant I needed to chart some kind of direction for myself. I knew that was true and necessary, but I was also in no hurry. Sure, I’d been bent on being a botany savant from middle school—or, I corrected myself, Thad had been, and he was the anomaly. Heck, when it came to life-direction, my own brother had never bothered. The pizza mogul life had been sort of foisted on him, and he’d since accepted it as his fate and as his role in the community he lived in, but he’d never actually chosen—

I stopped in my tracks. Shit, I thought. If I wasn’t Thad anymore, was Mike still my brother? 

Yes, I told myself firmly, purposefully resuming my walk. I wasn’t giving that up. Mike was my brother. Soul-duped Mike in Thad’s body was my brother. Thad in Rex’s body was my brother. I now had a whole freakin’ SUV full of brothers for a change, and wasn’t that an interesting image to contemplate. I should text Eddie and ask for his advice on being a part of a large family of very self-willed alpha bros.

The phone in my back pocket buzzed repeatedly, as it had been off and on for a while. I pulled it out—it was a top-ranked Phantom Black Galaxy with all the bells and whistles. I half expected to see an angry text from the MyWay! Meat Manager (“Where are you??! Just because you’re pretty and popular doesn’t mean I won’t fire you, just you watch!!”), but it turned out to be a huge pile of hundreds of PicThread push notifications. Huh? 

I swiped up and the screen showed me the passcode prompt, and for a second I thought that was it. I jokingly contemplated the feasibility of asking Henry for the code through the empathic bond (“okay, think angry for 1, sad for 2, hungry for 7”)—but then the face-recognition decided that I was indeed Henry (body-swapping—there’s a scenario the software designers never planned for) and the screen cleared. Well, that was convenient. I’d need the passcode eventually, but for today at least I had a phone.

Curious, I opened PicThread and discovered that “I”—which is to say, Henry—was a huge PicThread star with nearly a million subscribers! I snorted. When I’d been mulling over a direction for my life, that sure wasn’t one of the ones I’d’ve been likely to have come up with. The latest raft of likes and comments, scads of them, were from a post that was only a couple of hours old, one that looked… very familiar. I smiled and shook my head. For me, kissing Eric had been all-consuming, but our 6-foot-10, exquisitely built, model-handsome, social-media-famous Henry had apparently been able to multitask well enough to pull out his phone and shoot a quick, artfully lit abs-up candid of the two of them lying in the grass macking for his fans. He’d even done it without Eric noticing, or so it seemed. 

The comments were full of hearts, eggplants, and fevered professions of lust, admiration, and envy. I checked the stats, and—criminy. Just in the two hours it had been live the snap had garnered over forty thousand likes. Unreal what this reality had done for all of us, and not least for the one who’d steered us into it. I hoped he was getting something out of it beyond the satisfaction of knowing thousands of guys beat off to him every day.

As I was scrolling through some of the previous image posts, frankly admiring Henry’s artistry and composition with his slim-muscled model-gorgeous body and Eric’s extraordinary, slightly inhuman physique in various environs over a solid year or so of steady, progressively more assured content, a notification floated. I’d just received a bank deposit, and… fuckerooney, so much for me wondering if he was monetizing his internet renown at all. That explained the pricey phone, at least. If Henry had still had a job at MyWay! in this universe, he probably didn’t need it anymore. 

I smirked a little. Might as well do my part, right? As long as I was Henry, I might as well be Henry. I looked around, and, deciding the reddening western sky through the tall trees was picturesque enough—the benefits of living in the Colorado Rockies—I used the PicThread app to angle my sculpted upper body to pick up just the right lighting. My tirelessly erect 17-inch snugglers were of course visible and pushing up well up out of my jeans, but I’d already seen from Henry’s previous posts that this wasn’t an issue, somehow, so I didn’t worry about it. I was reasonably confident at this point that for everyone who’d gotten cock upgrades in the reality change, the shirtless/visible boner look was categorically NBD; Henry’s PicThread feed pretty much cinched it. 

When everything looked right I raised two fingers and snapped a sultry-smiling selfie. Decent, if not up to Henry’s practiced standard, but I’d get better. I posted the pic with a caption that read, “Thinking of you” with a kiss emoji. As soon as it went live it started racking up likes and comments, a lot of them reciprocating the sentiment in various languages and emoji semaphores. I chuckled and pocketed the phone, continuing my solitary hike through the sloping woodlands with the glimmers of my scattered lover-coterie a constant presence in my heart.

That night Lex joined a work-exhilarated Eric and me for a night of languid lovemaking and cozy slumber. Henry in his Pex body was a no-show, still in the city as he had been most of the evening, but Eric had an explanation: “Pex” had shown up at Mystake midway through the night, creating quite a sensation as he did so. I could only imagine. Apparently nudity for the three giants was now normalized, as of when I wasn’t sure—Lex said he’d never worn clothes that he could remember—but that still left you with an eight-foot muscle god with two floor-dragging cocks and whose beauty was so intense it literally compelled your mounting (as it were) arousal. Eric told us, laughing, that probably half the dance floor came in their pants as Pex had waded through them, joined by many more through the course of the night as they got close enough to the mesmerizing behemoth to breathe in his scent and stroke his thick, flaccid but still enormous wangs as they danced around him in shifting knots of avid, well-built, increasingly horny admirers. 

In the end he’d left with a selection of no fewer than five premium twunks, a number he must have figured was sufficient for his needs. The sense of concentrated pleasure presently seeping through empathic bond like sap through a tree was giving us a rough measure of the progress of that particular ongoing story. I might have worried about Henry’s head being turned by such adoration, able to cull his lovers like a kid at a candy story pick-and-mix; but maybe it wasn’t egoism, just the healthy, endemic hedonism we all shared at the Hashery these days. I wasn’t sure yet. I was glad we weren’t properly stoned, as that would have made the emotional and sensory connection with out fuck-focused buddy much, much stronger even at a distance. 

Even so, his antics were more than enough to help fuel our own extended nocturnal pleasures as the three of us lolled about naked and aroused in Henry and Eric’s big, welcoming bed. It was an interesting way to spice up a three-way, with the potent hints of a fourth mixed in to everything we did to each other.

The morning came long after we did. I was posting a selfie of me in bed with my still-snoozing, blissed-out-looking lovers, both well known to the fans (especially Eric), when a video call came in. I answered it without thinking.

Two smiling fortysomething hotties appeared on the screen, one dark and one fair, their faces pressed in close together. “Happy twenty-third birthday, son!” they shouted, as full of cheer as a pep squad.

I gaped at them. Were Henry’s dads always this fine, or had Henry’s reality shift given them a little physiognomical boostage along with everything else? Because these two were so hot, H-O-T hot, my heart started thumping in my borrowed chest just at the sight of them in crystal-clear 4G high-def, and my morning wood was somehow getting ridiculously even harder. Something niggled at me, telling me that maybe the “two dads” scenario itself was an innovation belonging to this reality only. I tried to remember all our conversations back when he and Eric were in the store and I was trying to surreptitiously gather data on the incremental improvements I’d been dosing them over the course of two years. Hadn’t Henry mentioned a mom at some point? I was pretty sure he had, but then again, even with two dads he must still have had a mom, right? He must have gotten the red hair from somewhere, and anyway we hadn’t changed things so much that two men could make a baby in this reality… right? I was pretty sure that was true. 

Fuck, these guys were gorgeous. I stared at the duo, consciously speechless—knowing in that moment that the only coherent words my malfunctioning brain could have conjured were “Please kiss.”

The one on the left was darker, with visibly strong bare shoulders and a well-trimmed beard decorously shot through with the odd strand of gray, because of course one of my hot “daddies” had to be bearded and nicely muscled. His head hair was similarly inky with occasional streaks of silver, with a bit more near the temples. That and a few laugh lines were the only signs of age—he was probably in his early forties but with his friendly mien and natural beauty he could have passed for a decade younger than that easily. He had remarkable brown eyes and heart-stopping smile, and I was a bit embarrassed to feel my throbbing cocks push out a whole mess of precum onto my hard-cut abs as soon as my gaze fell of his full, wine-red lips. 

The one on the right in the brick-red tee shirt was fairer, almost elfin by comparison, but still extremely masculine. He had wavy shoulder-brushing lengths of pure white hair that seemed more an Anderson Cooper-style genetic fluke than a turn of years, not that you could tell his age at all. His features were sharp—that jawline could cut glass—and utterly smooth, his face equally devoid of wrinkles and beard. Most striking were his eyes: they were dark blue like Henry’s, deep and captivating. In fact, despite the lack of reddish-brown hair above or below he strongly resembled Henry in many respects, certainly more than the darker, bearded one, and not just in the eyes: he was model-handsome, like his son, but in a more Olympian way, as if the pure genes of a more sublime realm had been infused into a comely infant of our world. The word “demigod” had occurred to me before when I’d thought about how good-looking Henry was, and now the term had never seemed more apt. There was something roguish about Henry’s bio-dad, too—again, much like his progeny.

Eric must have been awoken by the two men greeting me. He sidled in closer, overlapping our shoulders, and waved at the phone, beaming. I dutifully tilted the camera to better show both of us, stroking his lush hair almost unconsciously with my free hand. “Morning, Henry-daddies!” Eric enthused happily.

The two men smiled but gave him matching affectionately admonishing looks. “Eric, son, we’ve told you not to call us that,” the snow-haired one said. His voice was a little deeper than I’d expected—even his larynx was slightly extra.

“Cliff and Lucas, remember?” the bearded one added remonstratively, pointing at himself and then his partner, as though this were a game they and Eric played periodically.

“Okay, Henry-daddies,” Eric agreed equably, grinning wide.

“Uh…” I tried to regain my equanimity. Both “daddies” were grinning, too, and the sense of conspiracy among the three of them helped ground me a bit—though I was still massively turned on. “Okay, that’s, uh, enough flirting for now,” I managed to get out, much to the other three’s amusement. 

Now Lex was awake, and he got in on the act, too. “Oh, hey, it’s the Henry-daddies!” he said. “Hi, Henry-daddies!”

Cliff and Lucas waved. “Hi Lex,” they said in unison. 

I rolled my eyes. “Stop calling them daddies!” Everyone was laughing now. “Fucking hell. What’s the schedule for today, daddies?”

Cliff and Lucas grinned and exchanged a look, and how they didn’t immediately start making out just from catching sight of each other I have no idea. “Eric knows,” Cliff said mysteriously.

“And you, Hendric Noah, are not to pester him,” Lucas added sternly, though with a glint in those dark blue eyes. 

Hendric? Really? I really should have checked my IDs before now. Not that anyone born with a name like Thaddeus had any right to complain, I mused philosophically. “I’ll do my best to act surprised,” I said as if much put-upon. 

“Eric?” both daddies responded, looking over at him.

Eric was comically indignant. “I didn’t tell!”

Cliff shook his head. “You three enjoy yourselves a bit more,” he said indulgently. “We’ll see you at ten! Don’t cum too much!”

“Lots of fluids!” added Lucas playfully.

“Oh my god!” I said, and quickly closed out the call as they started giggling. Lex and Eric took that as the cue to pounce, and… well. We were a little late to the first event.

Henry’s “daddies” lived in a very nice split-level in one of the more rarified suburbs of Colorado Springs, and this was our eventual birthday-party destination, after a few shenanigans along the way. Pex and a few others had  joined us, and we’d spent the morning playing paintball, which was a lot more fun than I’d expected. We played as individuals rather than teams, and Lucas won. (His silky snow-white hair should have been a liability in the shadow-filled woods we played in, but he tucked it under a dark beanie, and during the game he showed an almost preternatural ability to catch everyone at their most vulnerable.) I took a pic with the victor, me covered in paint and the two of us hugging in puerile celebration, and that one actually went viral for some reason. There’s no explaining social media.

After that had been the real surprise—a trip to Rod’s Toyotamart to pick out a new birthday truck, a gift from Cliff and Lucas. I didn’t even know if Henry already had a car, but I had a great time swarming the lot with my crew and my dads checking out the wares like the spoiledest little rich kid, then surprising them by choosing the most reliable of the higher-end luxury models, a sweet cobalt blue hybrid with a very smooth ride. The video selfies I took of me trying out the hybrid were trending, too. I have no idea why, but ol’ Rod sure was happy about it.

My dads paid cash and we got to roll it off the lot with Lex and Eric in the cab with me, headed straight back to the house for food and further festivities. Fortunately I was able to follow them the short distance there, because, silly me, I didn’t know where they actually lived, even though I’d ostensibly grown up in the place.

The party was not exactly intimate. There were something like 50 guests, pretty much all the people “I” knew, including everyone from the Hashery staff and quite a few regulars on top of a slew of others. So, in addition to me, Eric, Lex, Pex (actually Henry in Pex’s body), Cliff, and Lucas, there were Rex, Amir, and Bill from the Hashery, plus a dozen or so customers I thankfully recognized, like the body-upgraded Grant from the guesthouse. There were people from the MyWay! staff (fortunately Eric knew these as well); a smattering of friends from the neighborhood and school I had no chance of placing; and a bunch of guys whose connection to me was a mystery—though some of them were definitely giving me what felt like wistful-ex vibes. Fortunately with such a big crowd I didn’t have to talk with anyone for long. 

It wasn’t just coworkers, buddies, and lovers. There was some family, too. Cliff’s grown-up daughters from his previous marriage were there, as were several of Eric’s many siblings. Oh, and then there was my hunky older brother. 

No, not Mike. Henry’s older brother, Kevin. He looked even more like Lucas than I did, long and lanky with a cascade of white hair, but with eyebrows a few shades darker than Lucas’s. They were still a lot lighter than my reddish-brown, the effect managing to enhance his already remarkable beauty. 

Kevin was even more affectionate than my dads had been. As soon has he saw me he grabbed me up in a bear hug as soon that lasted a really long time. I hugged him back, because, hey, you don’t want your brother to feel unappreciated, do you?

The second weirdest thing about hugging Kevin was that he was almost exactly as tall as I was, though not as built. That was a novelty. In Henry’s body I was 6-foot-10, and everyone around me was either normal-human-sized like Eric, Cliff, and Lucas, or eight-foot giants like Lex, Pex, and Rex. Holding someone my size in my arms felt unexpectedly nice. 

The weirdest thing was that he had my 17-inch snuggle cocks, though unlike me he wore a navy blue tee-shirt over ‘em, which to my thinking was guaranteeing stains that must have necessitated either very diligent laundering or a huge supply of disposable tees. The fact that he had dupes of my mutant boners kind of weirded me out even as it turned me on. 

The whole thing was a good reminder of just how strange my life was these days. I mean, I’d thought the distinctive arrangement of my cocks, almost like it was one fat boner until you slid your tongue between them, was something unique about me, but… evidently Henry, consciously or not, had set it up as something genetic? Which immediately prompted the question: if there was a gene for it, just how many people in this world had the giant-double-snuggle-dick mutation?

No, fuck that. The question it prompted was: what the fuck did Lucas’s junk look like? And how weird was it that I wanted to find out?

Kevin was still hugging me, and I could feel his boners pressed against mine. Was that a very, very infinitesimal motion, the meagerest of rutting? Fuck, dude, if you want to do me with those I might just let you, though my boyfriends will probably want a shot at you afterwards.

“Bro, happy birthday,” Kevin said, his voice deep and rumbly-sexy, like his dad’s. He pulled back from the hug at last, though his arms were still around me. “It is so good to see you,” he said, staring deep into my eyes. The music and conversation swirled around us. My guys had left to consult with Cliff and Lucas about secret birthday plans, so it was just me and my hot, extra-tall brother.

“Uh, you too, Kev,” I said, hoping he didn’t notice the twitching of my exposed cocks. “What’s, uh, new?”

“Hah,” Kevin snorted, as if it were ludicrous of me to ask. “Hey, aren’t you going to selfie with me? The two of us always get you a ton of likes.” 

No doubt, I thought. I had been doing selfies with the party guests I knew, so there was no reason not to do one with my exceptionally gorgeous older brother and fuel, I had no doubt, a few prurient narratives about us. So I pulled out the trusty cellphone and took a nice shot of me and Kevin with his arm around me. It was a waist-up shot so our dicks were in it, but when I reviewed the pic… honestly, what caught my eye was how cute he was and how long and lithe his tighter, extremely defined torso looked. Fuck, I was leaking precum down my treasure trail and straight onto my balls. In a previous life I might have asked how I could be horny after making love in a super-hot and extremely intimate threesome all night (with a fourth lover’s athletic fucking bleeding through on top of it); but in this universe some libidos never seemed to quit.

Kevin nodded at the pic, and I posted it. “All right, now a sexy one,” he said.

I looked up at him, confused, and I guess bringing my mouth in range was the cue, ‘cause he went for the kiss. Somehow my thumb pressed the shutter button, and I got a second pic of me and my hot brother making out. Okay then.

As soon as he heard the fake camera click of the picture being taken Kevin ended the kiss, though not without a playful spine-tingling lick along the underside of my tongue. We checked the picture, me in a bit of a daze. “Nice,” Kevin said. He looked at me. “Uh, you gonna post it?” he nudged, smiling wide.

I blinked once, the pic still all I could see. “S-sure, if you like it,” I said faintly, tapping the keys to post the pic to my feed.

He shrugged, rubbing his shoulders against mine. “We can take more later,” he said easily. “C’mon, it’s time for cake.” With his arm still around me he guided me to the backyard where a pavilion and a bunch of tables were set up. Most of the guests had already migrated out here—evidently they were waiting for me.

“Hey there, birthday boy,” Pex said, joining us. He was truly massive, towering over us as we walked across the very green lawn. In fact, from my new perspective it seemed like a naked giant dragging the twin leg-sized tools took up the physical and mental space of at least two people. “Having fun?” he teased.

I looked up at him, feeling a crooked smile on my lips. “Are you?”

“Immensely.” 

“I could tell,” I said, thinking of his cum-spitting exploits as Pex the night before.

He looked down at me with a feral smile. “I might just keep things this way,” he said cockily. He scoped down my, formerly his, body, as if he couldn’t fathom having ever possessed of such a mundane form. “What do you think of that… Henry?”

We stopped in mid-lawn, and I held his gaze. “Fine with me… Pex,” I answered honestly. I could deal with charting a new course from the starting point I was already at. Just to test the waters with Henry-as-Pex, I turned to Kevin. “Pex, you know my brother, Kevin?”

Pex extended a massive hand. “Can’t say we’ve met in person. Nice to meet you.” Kevin took his hand and they shook briefly. Kevin couldn’t help but scope the colossal body and inhuman cocks, and Pex smirked. “You can stroke ’em if you want,” he said conversationally. 

Kevin drew closer to me, as if making a deliberate choice. Both his hands were on me know, one in back and one pressed to my bare chest. Pex was compellingly attractive—even I was feeling it, as I was used to it, but it seemed Kevin found him… resistible. 

“That’s okay,” Kevin said. It wasn’t said harshly, just without the fully-loaded carnal draw that Pex was already used to.

Pex’s eyebrows lifted slightly as he looked between us. “Interesting,” he said with a big smile. He put a hand on my shoulder, as if he wanted to claim me, too. “C’mon, we’re holding things up.”

And with that we headed into the pavilion, and I tried not to think about the previous conversation and what it meant for me-as-Henry, Henry-as-Pex, and all of the people connected to us, most of whom were at this moment gathered under this very pavilion and eager to wish Henry-me a very happy birthday.

It turned out there were a few cakes. Specifically, two sheet cakes, one white and one chocolate, shared by the bulk of the guests, and a special red velvet layer cake for my dads and my boyfriends. “It looks delicious,” I said, as we gathered around it. “Is it homemade?”

“We all helped,” Eric said.

“We even contributed the ingredients,” Lex added. When I looked up at him in shock he winked and mouthed, Ganymede Zeta.

Shiiiiit. That was the strongest stuff I—sorry, Thad—had ever bred. There was a pair of boytaur stoners in Denver somewhere that were owed their configuration to the potency of this shit after just one joint; though it was also the quickest to wear off, by design. Lex must have chosen this blend very deliberately. 

I took an involuntary step backward. “Wow,” I said. “That’s… really awesome of you guys…”

I tried to recede further, but Kevin and Pex still had a hold of me. “Come on, birthday boy,” Pex said mischievously. “You get the first piece. Make sure it’s a big one!”

The Ganymede Zeta took hold pretty quickly, and I felt the connection between me, Eric, Lex, and Pex blossoming as extreme intoxication set in. We were sitting together at one of the round side tables, everything normal and routine (as much as it ever was for me these days), and then all of a sudden we were flying. I’d have been afraid of my daddies getting all annoyed at my getting insta-stoned on high-intensity supercannabis at my birthday party… only they were eating it, too, and flying with me. That made me giggle. 

Though they weren’t linked to us I could kind of feel Cliff and Lucas soaring with us, and Kevin too, turning our foursome into seven. I could feel everyone’s overwhelming arousal, each horny stoner multiplying everyone else’s, so that I was flooded with sex and hormones and pot-ecstasy on a scale that seemed inhuman and unmeasurable, at least from within it.

So it was remarkable that I could sense certain things with great clarity. I could feel Lex’s brain opening up, not to us but to the infinite transformative power of the metaverse he had access to by dint of some biological quirk only Thad’s hash could have exposed. Hell, I could taste the inrush of that fathomless power. For some reason I thought it had a raspberry tinge, though that might just have been my brain playing tricks on me. Went well with the cake, though.

Almost as soon as Lex’s mind opened up, I felt Henry/Pex reach out for it with greedy mental fists, wanting to make more changes to reality after his heady sojourn in the massive, overcocked Rex-clone body I had once inhabited. I growled through our connection, wanting to stop him, but he ignored me. The others were oblivious, swooning with overlaid euphoria. 

Pex reached out again, grabbing for the power, and—nothing. 

I felt his attention turn accusingly to me, the only being in our pleasure universe of seven aware of him. What did you do? It wasn’t words, but the feeling was clear.

I giggled, then laughed. I laughed out loud. It was all so clear! Henry’s gift for steering realities wasn’t mental, like he’d thought. I’d have guessed that too, that it was all about intent and attitude.

But it wasn’t. It was biological. It was gift that belonged to Henry’s physical body—the body I now possessed.

I laughed again as Pex figured it out, one step behind me. My mirth rippled through the group of us, and the others chuckled too, not knowing why. 

Pex’s disembodied radiance of being watched me warily.

Sober, I had pity on Henry/Pex. I was worried about him. In my altered state, though, things were more black and white. He’d gotten too big for his britches—literally! He’d actually had to wish away pants for himself and the other giants. I laughed again, enjoying the feeling of it reverberating infectiously through our raspberry-flavored universe. 

Time for Pex to experience a little debigulation.

I waded through a succession of enticing possibilities, each one more real than real. Shrinking Pex down, a little each day, none of us knowing where it would end. Cutting his size in half, leaving him a four-foot-tall muscle beast… but leaving his dicks and balls alone, so he’d still have to drag four-foot wangs around everywhere. Rebaselining humanity so that “normal” was twelve feet tall, while he stayed at eight feet. There were so many possibilities.

I wasn’t that vindictive, though, and I didn’t really want to dick around with the universe the way he did. A correction was needed, that was all, and I was the one to do it. Then I hit on an idea, one that seemed really perfect at the time. Of course, “at the time” was when I was impossibly stoned and crazy horny, so, hmmm. 

Maybe lucid me wouldn’t have made that particular choice, or maybe it wasn’t me so much as my unconscious that pulled the lever, but….

We all sort of came to at once, the high receding rapidly with only a lingering sense of deep contentment, as it was engineered to do. We were still at the same table, more or less unmoved, and the party seemed to have continued around us like we’d only checked out for a minute or two. I sighed and looked around, and—okay, why were there three Kevins?

The sexy Kevin sitting next to me grinned. “Great cake, bro!”

The sexy Kevin sitting where Lex had been sitting nodded fervently. “Totally, bro!”

The sexy Kevin sitting where Pex had been sitting cocked an eyebrow at me. “Yeah,” he said drily. “Positively life-altering.”

Shit. I definitely should not reshape the universe while stoned. 

This thought was confirmed when another Kevin approached the table. “Hey Henry,” said Rex amiably. “Enjoying your birthday gifts?”

The giants. I hadn’t just shrunk one giant into a dupe of my extra-affectionate, hot-’n’-lanky brother, whom I’d kind of been crushing on for the whole hour I’d known him. I’d meant to target just the one cocky body-swapped giant, but instead I’d managed to shrink all the giants. Whoops! I was like the firing squad guy with a bazooka instead of a rifle, taking out the whole prison instead of just the single condemned. I didn’t know it was loaded!

I looked around me. Yep. Eric, the daddies, and four Kevins, the latter four all with identical hot faces, identical hot-’n’-lanky bodies, even identical clothes. The naked thing was evidently so previous-reality. 

Yep. Yep yep yep. All three giants were now identical quads with my actual brother—and everyone but me and Pex were completely, utterly clueless that this wasn’t the way it had always been.

I felt a keen dark-blue stare boring into me, and turned abruptly to meet daddy Lucas’s stern-but-amused, and very knowing, gaze. It seemed to say, This was your choice? Really?

Okay, not just me and Pex, then. Great.

Fucking hell. This fucking reality-dicking needed a fucking user’s manual.

“We’re missing the party,” Bill said. He glanced over his shoulder through the back window of the truck, as though Henry’s blowout birthday bash might have somehow gone mobile and decided to trail after us down Bear Creek Road like a parade float. Ludicrous, maybe, but then things had been getting increasingly bananas ever since the night of the storm, when the world started twisting around for no reason I could see. Visibly to me, also for no reason I could see. 

We were in my truck, on a little side quest to cool down a bit from the competitive mayhem of all-in no-teams paintball. I was driving, and Bill was in the back seat. His old Kia was in the shop with a serious transmission problem, so I was his ride for the day. He didn’t seem to mind much being stuck with me. It might have just been curiosity. I got the feeling that out of all the Hashery boys I was the only one that was still a bit of a mystery to him.

Seeing a distinct lack of self-propelled shindigs behind us, Bill faced forward again and met my eyes in the rear-view mirror. His expression was slightly anxious. Being at that party—being a part of the social group—was important to him. I knew that about him, and that’s from someone for whom understanding the demanding, petty, contradictory emotional needs of others was neither a habit nor a compelling motivation. 

We all melted a little around Bill, but I promise you I fought it as hard as I could. I’d almost put him in the front seat for this trip, just from a hopeful look on that easy-grin pretty-boy-jock face, but in this reality the truck had always been a king-cab four-seater and I always occupied both front seats. 

For some reason people always assume having two physical forms under the control of one consciousness (that’s how my doctor described it when he wrote it up—evidently it’s pretty rare, certainly a lot rarer that my stacked-up extra arms or my two impractically thick rageboners) is a multitasker’s dream. You get to go off and do two different things and so get twice as much done. Sounds great! But it isn’t like that. You know that thing where you try patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time? It’s like that. Parallel conscious actions don’t get much easier when you’re doing one on one body and one on the other. There’s a bit of improvement—because I have two brains I can do very basic things independently if I start with a conscious nudge—but nothing complex. I can jerk off with one body while I’m showering with the other, which saves time in a cabin with a bathroom built for one regular-sized guy, not two.

Plus I get weird when my bodies aren’t together. People have trouble with that one, too. I know it’s one mind, two bodies, but more than, I dunno, fifty feet apart it starts getting uncomfortable. I get this mental nausea, like vertigo. I even have this memory of a road trip with a bunch of guys from when I was a teenager. There wasn’t room for both of me in the same car, which, okay, even then I took up a bit more space than most people owing to the stacked pecs and extra arms, though the real reason was that there were two guys who wanted to seduce me and they planned it so they would each be in the back seat of one of the cars so they’d each get a chance to be crushed up against me. Anyway, there was construction, the cars got separated, and the further apart we were the sicker I got until both cars were stopped on the side of the road a mile apart from each other and both my bodies were barfing over the guard rails into Lassiter Ravine. 

Now, objectively I know that didn’t happen. I’ve only had a double complement of bodies for two weeks, and ordinary original-reality teenager-me was a moody loner with no one obsessing over him, unless you counted Coach Tanner’s constant disappointment with my hundred-meter dash in middle school. The scary thing is, random memories of this-universe-me, the altered me, have been fighting their way into my brain as if forcing their way through the protective membrane that keeps me uniquely aware of the changes that have been done to me, making me more and more aware of the life I would have lived in this alternate universe. 

Everyone else? They just switched over like they were changing channels, and all their memories were instantly from this universe, the one where diphallics are a recognized cultural minority with their own pop stars, politicians, and plumbers. My friends don’t know they switched over. Me, I remember someone flipping that remote, and every day I struggle to decide whether I’m lucky to retain awareness of this super-weird ubersexualized comprehensive mutation of basic human reality… or if I’m cursed, deprived of the clueless sexual contentment the likewise-augmented around me to be enjoying. 

The memories of this universe seeping in like sentient weeds out to choke a garden, though—that’s just disturbing either way.

It’d help if I weren’t the only one with the metaphorical They Live! glasses. So far, everyone I’ve talked to remembers always being like this. It’s unnerving. Still, that kid Henry did seem a little cagey about it, and my conversation with the one they called Pex—which? I refuse to—was… I guess you’d say inconclusive. He seemed confused about a lot of things. Maybe when we get back to the party I’ll arrange a little one-on-one time with Influencer Douche and see what’s what.

Or, maybe not one-on-one. Does it count as two-on-one if it’s me? I don’t even know.

So, yeah. Upshot is, Soccer Boy gets the back seat like everyone else. I’m fond of him, and a little horny for him, like we all are. But I do things the way I do things.

“Relax,” I said, meeting his eyes in the mirror, then looking back at the road. “Your buddy Henry’s still car-shopping. We’ve got time before the presents and cake.” I knew the schedule. I only had to scowl at Eric once before he cracked.

“Time for what, though?” Bill asked curiously. “You never said.”

“So true.”

Bill blew out a breath, choosing to be amused by my crotchetiness. I smiled a little, twice over.

About ten minutes later we arrived at the big Tudor-style guest house Bill had been staying at. I’d taken a roundabout route to keep him in suspense as to my intended destination, but as soon as we got onto the little side street where the Belvedere was he sat up, watching out the window with interest. I pulled in and parked, yanking the brake, then turned in my seats to look at him. 

“Go get yer stuff,” I ordered gruffly.

It’s hard to say what it is about Bill. My daily life involves pretty much nothing but hot guys. Thad, all dark and reserved, was steamy, strong, and silent hot. Aleksei, blond and cheeky, was more of a smart-and-sexy hot. Thanks to Thad’s mad-scientist secret breeding of the basic gradual-upgrade weed we sold to the unsuspecting general public, most of our regular customers were hot: goofy college-boy stoner hot, seasoned marijuana enthusiast hot, casual-user professional hot, bike nut only-smokes-after-a-race hot, and so on. With the reality retcon, my immediate circle was all that times ten. Bill shouldn’t have stood out, but he did.

Looking at him, your eye was drawn to the clean lines and pleasing symmetry. He was visibly an athlete by nature, constructed with careful precision and a real appreciation for aesthetics, like a sports car designed by someone with a love for the abstract idea of speed, power, efficiency, and beauty made manifest in the real world as a single entity, a realization of simple mechanical perfection so effective it was hard to pull your gaze away from him. His skin was smooth and lightly tanned, like a Midwestern boy used to getting plenty of sun as gamboled through the fields and open spaces of his world, trapping a bit of its buttery warmth under his taut, translucent skin. He was tall in a way that emphasized the strength of his component parts: well-sculpted arms, wide shoulders, a tapered torso, and long, well-shaped legs that could dominate the ball on a soccer pitch or carry him tirelessly past the horizon. His close-pressed, navel-high cocks were reminiscent of his overall silhouette: long, strong, and enticingly beautiful.

His chest, too, was singular and characteristic of the whole. I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of pecs these days, what with the general shirt aversion among those I tended to deal with on a daily basis. These range from thick, hairy boulder-pecs (like mine) to thick, overstuffed shelf-like pecs (what muscle-god Eric ended up with after the reality retcon) to round and a little flat in front (like our PicThread star Henry). Bill’s weren’t the biggest or the best developed, but there was something about them that made me that much more attracted to him. They were kind of square and not too thick, and evenly developed top to bottom as well as side to side, with a thin brush of barely-there chest hair subtly delineating the space between. The overall effect was quite pleasing. Their elegance and Bill’s subtle all-over tan made his tiny brown nipples stand out a bit, though generally you’re taking in the whole package more than you’re focused on the component parts. Like his thighs they seemed to contain a lot of concentrated raw power, like he could get down and do a thousand push-ups without breaking a sweat.

He was mostly hairless apart for a thin swath of faint brown on his forearms and calves and that almost invisible bit of chest hair, plus a faint line trailing down from his tight outie belly button. Up top the hair was buzzed short and neatly trimmed around the ears, but a few stray light brown locks in front sneaking little three-quarter arcs past his hairline gave away the curls he’d be prone to if he let it grow. His face was handsome but also boyishly adorable at the same time. His jaw was sharp, his cheekbones high but not pronounced, his nose straight but unobtrusive, his lips… distracting. Sleek eyebrows, darker than the head-hair above, accentuated medium-brown eyes that brimmed with life and energy. They were the kind of eyes you couldn’t help but stare into. I’ve seen a lot of eyes that were dull and deflecting, or sharp and off-putting; his, by contrast, were vivacious and inviting, drawing you in not out of calculation or artifice but simple joie de vivre. 

The funny thing was, he was boyish in looks, but not childish. I was used to being the designated adult on campus even before things got strange. Thad wasn’t immature in the reckless, parties-and-fuckbuddies kind of way, but there was an immaturity to his obsessive breeding and testing that meant he’d missed out on a lot of things guys normally start to value as they reached his age. Aleksei was more impulsive, and spent half his time mooning over Thad, who (case in point) remained oblivious. Their distractions meant the mundane details were left to me. The current crew made Thad and Aleksei look like Amish elders by comparison. Bill was young, but more than the others he seemed to pay attention to his friends and surroundings. Henry, Eric, Rex and Lex, they all seemed preoccupied by themselves and each other, which is fine; but with Bill you got the sense that what mattered was not the self or the other but the interplay between them. The energy that flickered between two people interacting seemed to fascinate him, and it made you kind of want to be around him just to facilitate that interaction, because it made made him happy.

I said before that we were all a bit horny for Soccer Boy. That’s true, but it’s also a bit misleading in my case, because I was more than a bit horny for him. Being near him filled me with a level of intense attraction I was simply not used to, and his smile and the way he looked at you… Let’s just say, my dicks wanted him, and my hearts wanted him. And knowing the fact that my being the intimidating, slightly older grouch in the group curbed my chances with him, just made me that extra bit grouchier.

When I told him to get his things, Bill lit up in a way that, unfortunately for the level of arousal being suffered by my already-hard cocks and the longing in my hard-pumping hearts, made him about 20% cuter than his usual, latent cuteness. I pushed it down, but it wasn’t easy. 

“You mean it?” he asked, all hope and excitement. He’d been begging me to let him move into Thad’s house, but I’d been resisting, mostly because it was Thad’s house, not mine—and not Rex’s, however much he pretended it was.

“It’s not the big house,” I warned him before he got carried away. At his questioning look I explained, “There’s a few more cabins up my way—the previous owner used to rent them out for campers and hunters, before Thad bought the land and established the Hashery. The one nearest mine is in good shape, just needs some fixing up. We’ll move you in there when it’s ready.”

“And until then?” Bill’s eyes were shining with anticipation, and he unconsciously licked his lips with both tongues, one after the other. His long cocks were spitting little drops of pre, too, like they usually did when his exuberance amped up. His upper abs tended to be a bit damp and slippery, which… well, you already kind of wanted to lick him anyway, and that just made the urge a lot more annoyingly persistent.

“Until then,” I said reluctantly, “you can bunk with me.”

The pre-spitting accelerated, and Bill’s grin widened a little more than I thought possible. Fuck. I got defensive. “I’m just tired of giving you a ride from here every time you come in for a shift,” I argued grumpily. “It was either this or fix that heap of yours myself.”

Bill nodded knowingly. “Uh huh,” he said. Then he singsonged, “You like having me around…”

For some reason my nipples tingled at that. I wasn’t expecting it. Eight nipples is a lot of tingle. “Are you getting your stuff or not?” I growled.

Bill shrewdly let his smile moderate, not wanting to tick me off too much. Fuck, he was more adorable with a smile than with a grin. Consciously or not, this kid knew exactly how to get under everyone’s skin, especially mine. “Okay,” he said breezily as he got out of the truck. “Come help!” Then the door slammed and he was already halfway to the house, giving me a single quick look back to make sure I was following.

Fine. I released my seatbelts and sighed in harmony. Did I know Soccer Boy had arrived with, like, one gym bag and basically had no “stuff” to speak of that would require two (or, I guess, three) people? Of course I did. Did I get out of the truck and follow him into the guesthouse anyway like a chump? Don’t ask stupid questions.

The matronly woman behind the counter looked up with interest when we came through the door. Often I’m the one to attract attention—the arm-stack is not unique to me but it is quite rare, though more common in Asia I’ve heard—but it was Bill the proprietress noticed. She beamed at him. “Have you worn them down at last?” she asked him as he bounded up to the counter and leaned on it with his forearms. 

“I’m so sorry to be leaving you, ‘Mrs. Belvedere,’” he told her with a grin. He didn’t seem sorry at all. 

I hung back, making an effort to not actually stare while still surreptitiously enjoying the gentle swell of his lats and how they gave perfect shape to his bare, lightly sun-tinted back from under my lashes. And then there was the ass, not too large but perfectly shaped, exactly the right contours to attract the hands, or to watch your eager pole slide slowly between them… I tried to bitch at myself for getting even more turned on by the anterior view presented by my young crush, but the problem with that was my usual plea against calamity—”You’ll get a hard-on and everyone will see!”—was rather blunted by the fact that since the retcon I was hard pretty much all the time and my ridiculously wide cocks were, let’s face it, impossible to miss. They flexed a little as I deeply appreciated Bill from behind, but they couldn’t out my arousal any more than it already was.

Instead I tried to distract myself by wondering if the trim, auburn-haired woman was actually named “Mrs. Belvedere.” I suspected the moniker was a private joke—places called Belvedere weren’t usually founded or run by people named Belvedere, and Bill seemed like exactly the kind of guy to have watched old reruns of the TV show and then jokingly apply the name to someone personable and experienced in hospitality.

The woman had adopted an indulgent expression. “I can tell you are,” the woman teased. Without warning she lifted her chin toward the lobby’s rear door, which stood open on the back garden, and bellowed, “GRAAAAANT!”

A very tall, stockily muscled diphallic hunk appeared in the doorway almost instantly, ducking under it and entering the room with a grin. I recognized him as a regular, and in particular as the guy who’d been with Bill the day of the reality explosion. “Hey, Bill-o!” Grant enthused. He caught sight of me and nodded respectfully. “Hey there, Mr. Hassan.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he turned quickly away. “So, Bill-o, what’s up?”

“He’s finally moving in over at the Hashery,” the woman Bill had called ‘Mrs. Belvedere’ said smugly, as though she’d arranged it as a well-deserved life-upgrade for her favorite guest. 

“Oh yeah? That’s great,” Grant said, though he obviously had mixed feelings on the matter. “More reason for me to come by and buy weed, then. Right, Mr. Hassan?”

I kicked my death glare up a notch. Call me that again, I dare you. 

“Stop poking the bear,” Bill laughed, heading for the stairs. “C’mon, let’s clean out room 31.”

“Sure,” Grant said, catching up and trotting up the steps beside him. I followed at a polite distance, trying not to stomp on the old wooden staircase. I felt like stomping, so it was a challenge. “Say, Bill-o,” Grant said diffidently, “you wanna maybe have a little fuckerooni before you go? Like a reverse christening. Say goodbye to the place.”

Bill made a show of looking him up and down as they started up the second flight of stairs to the third floor, eyeing his brawny seven-foot form and hefty cocks appraisingly. “I ain’t got time for all this,” he said, gesturing at Grant and laying on the smarm. “I got places to be.”

“Aw, you’re no fun,” Grant mock-pouted. “No one I know sucks these guys half as well as you. Myself included!”

“Oh, poor you,” Bill scoffed, chuckling. “I know for a fact that the backpackers in room 23 are saving themselves for another go-round with you.”

“They were pretty good last time,” Grant admitted as they reached the door to 31. Bill pulled out his key card and unlocked the door. “Not as good as you, though,” Grant added with a smirk. 

Bill grinned at him. “Uh huh,” he said. “Go get that hot tight-bodied pharma salesguy in 39 and have him fuck you while they suck you off. You’ll forget all about me.”

“Never would I forget you,” Grant said loyally, though his expression said he was intrigued by the proposed four-way. 

As soon as they were both in the room, Grant bent and cupped Bill’s face, bringing their mouths together for a deep and rather probing kiss, which Bill returned with some enthusiasm. I hung back in the hallway, watching them with annoyance and a certain amount of heartburn. Why was I even here? Why was I subjecting myself to this? Who the fuck was I?

Finally I just pushed into the little room and started gathering Bill’s things for him. “Places to be, remember?” I said tersely, holding Bill’s gym bag open on the bed with one body while I carefully placed his jeans and underwear into it with the other. No shirts, I noticed. Like the rest of our group, he literally never wore them.

Grant broke the kiss, glancing at me awkwardly. “Right, I better let you go,” he told Bill. “I’ll see you at the shop, okay?”

Bill gave him a warm smile. “You bet,” he said. “Remember what I said about the pharma guy,” he added with a wink.

Grant was in the hall, grinning. He tilted his head to the left, toward the other end of the long corridor. “On my way there now,” he said. He glanced at me, as if considering offering me a goodbye, but my expression must have decided him against it. Instead he waved at Bill, said a last “See ya,” and left.

To my surprise, Bill moved in front of the me holding the bag open, sliding a palm over my stone-hard upper pecs, leaving the other me to stand there behind him holding a small pile of socks. My cocks twitched strongly in reaction to his touch. “Someone was a little extra-grumpy around the big, sexy hunk,” he observed slyly. “Jealous, ‘Mr. Hassan’?”

I met his gaze, and I could feel the fire pouring out of me. Something about the way he was taunting me felt… right, like he was on my wavelength, not his. I quirked my lips. “You sure you don’t want that ‘fuckerooni’… Bill-o?” I responded in kind. 

Bill had both his hands on my upper pecs now. I moved my other body closer behind him, silently unloading the socks onto the bed next to us. 

Bill’s expression softened, growing more serious, and my pulse quickened. “I think you know what I want,” he said. The way he said it, I could hear the different meanings. 

Having resigned myself to thinking this would never happen, though, I had to know for sure. “Tell me,” I said, resting my hands on his shoulders from behind as I stared into his eyes. 

Bill slid his hands down onto my equally furry lower pecs. I balled my fists on that body, waiting to engulf him. 

“I came here,” Bill said earnestly, holding my gaze as he ran his fingers through my thick chest hair, “because Rex… he opened something up in me.”

I snorted a derisive laugh. “Did he?” I said.

Bill swatted my pec, grinning. “Stop. You know what I mean. I discovered I didn’t just want ordinary guys. I wanted—” He shrugged. “—more.” He moved the tops of his fingers down further, brushing over my nipples, and I sucked in a breath. 

I pictured the man who had just left: 7 feet of delicious muscle… big sweet cocks half again the size of Bill’s… two tongues like Bill, too. The guy was hardly mundane. 

“Grant isn’t—” I tried to object, but just then he got my nipples between his forefingers and thumbs and twisted very gently, and in the flash of pleasure that sizzled through both bodies I completely lost whatever the rest of that thought was.

Bill knew what I was trying to say. “He is, though,” he insisted in a whisper. “I want,” he repeated, his eyes locked on mine, “a man who is more.”

More layered meanings. I understood. With a last creak and a shuddering snap, the dam broke. I moved in as one, enclosing him with my bodies, and in a heartbeat I was holding him close as I kissed mouth and neck. My cocks had never been this hard, nuzzling wet and hot against his back and abs as if those surfaces had been invented for their profound delectation. Bill was right there with me, ready and responsive to my every touch. He opened for me without hesitation, slyly offering both his long, talented tongues to me as my single, thicker one found them and twisted against them. Our mouths and tongues seemed to inflame our passions. The effect was transformative—for me it was like I had never kissed before. Not properly. Not the way it was supposed to be done. 

After a few minutes of this I broke the kiss, panting harshly. “The party,” I rasped. “You wanted to be at the party.” I swallowed. “Cake and presents. Remember?”

Bill’s eyes were dark with lust. “I decided I’d rather have a different kind of cake.”

I blew out a breath, grinning at him. “You corny fuck,” I said, and dove in for a second kiss, one that didn’t end until after we came like mess machines all over ourselves, each other, and a few bits of room 31.

After the cake I slipped away from the crowd into the house. I was on a mission—I had to find a mirror.

My inner snarkmeister told me I didn’t need one—I could stay where I was and look in any direction, and someone with my face would be looking back at me. But I had to see it for myself. At least with so many Kevins no one really noticed me ducking out from the family group gathered around the fake birthday boy piloting my body around like it was his all along. 

The noise of the party receded as I trotted up the stairs and turned to job along the back upper hallway. Was the house bigger then I remembered? I passed the various framed photos, not really looking at them, and then the one big one mounted in the hall outside my dads’ room caught my eye and I jerked to a stop, practically making cartoon err-rr-k braking noises as I did so.

It was a huge family grouping, professionally photographed and mounted in a four-foot-wide frame over a narrow table with smaller framed portraits and a little vase of delicate origami flowers. The whole happy brood was there, dressed the same in jeans and matching short-sleeve rugby shirts, everyone with a different color combo, everyone posed in front of a bucolic green-hilled background. 

I stared with rapt interest at this artifact of a world Pex and I had created. I remembered, vividly, the original version of this portrait, from what I was tempted to call my birth reality, though it had had half as many people in it and we weren’t so jolly looking and generally content. We hadn’t been so systematically attired, either, but maybe if you’re a big family with two dads and five extra-tall Abercrombie jock sons, four of them identical, you’re a bit more likely to lean toward visual thematics.

Top center were my two dads, Cliff and Lucas, in blue-on-red and red-on-blue rugby patterns respectively. This pairing had been one of the more, shall we say, reckless transformations of my brief but eventful stint as a “chooser of tubes,” sliding me and those around me from one reality to another through a power I no longer had to steer Lex’s innate, half-aware supercannabis-fueled access to primordial forces beyond human understanding. It was this dread, limitless power, and I’d used it to fuck around with bodies and cocks because… well, I guess I could excuse it by saying I get really horny and self-focused when I’m super high, but it seemed really childish now that the shoe was on someone else’s foot. 

Either way, my going from passively envisioning sliding down tubes as a rationalized, pot-hazed philosophy for metaphorically coping with the tribulations of ordinary life, to actually being able to literally shift us into increasingly more bizarrely-altered realities of my own making, had yielded, in the giddy moments of my empowerment, to some… rather extreme decisions. These had led in turn, perhaps inevitably, to my current after-school-special comeuppance where all the perspective I’d lost growing everyone’s dicks and hubristically swapping other people’s lives around willy-nilly was gathered up and served back to me like a lemon meringue pie straight in the kisser, complete with laughing crowds and a taunting wah-wah-wah soundtrack.

Okay, true, all this was still a lot dirtier, as scenarios went, than an archetypical after-school special. Not a lot of spurting cum, big hard cocks, and unabashed twincest in those preachy old afternoon melodramas. But the lesson was real. The chagrin I felt was real, and it was hitting me harder the longer I stared at this family portrait. There was unease, too, a sort of low-grade helplessness that came with being stuck in a reality I hadn’t made—a reality now controlled by a less-than-adept practitioner, if the new Henry’s “oops moment” of creating a bevy of lusty Kevins was any guide. I’d been driving this Ferrari, only to suddenly swap seats with the kid who’d never learned to drive just as we were speeding into the twisty cliffside road at a hundred miles an hour…

In that context, the big family portrait I was staring at was like a map of the new reality we’d just entered, a still frame showing what was changed layered onto the earlier drafts.

Cliff, my dad, was not too far off from what I remembered growing up. Then as now he was a handsome, dark-haired, genial, bearded and fit forty-four-year-old cud, physically a real dad’s dad. This version was a bit hotter and younger-looking, a tad more scrumptiously muscled (those thick shoulders of his were filling out that rugby shirt very nicely), and his charisma was upped a notch or five. My junk flexed a bit, just looking at him in this portrait. But he was still essentially my dad, just without all the anger and bitterness that had made him such a fuckwad in my old reality. That smile was real now, not a plastered-on salesman’s smile. Remembering how egoistically entitled and battle-ready my dad had been, it was kind of heartbreaking to see this kind of genuine happiness and contentment on his face and in the set of his shoulders that had never been there growing up.

Next to him was… not my mom. 

I was really conflicted about that one. I hadn’t even altered my parents on purpose. As we’d slid, unbelievably stoned, into the reality just prior to this one I’d been thinking hazily about how unhappy they both were, and some unconscious part of me had twisted us all feet-first into a possible universe where, in accordance with deep, half-hidden desires on my part, my dad had someone incredible who loved him instead of my mom, a self-centered tornado who never thought twice about ruining someone else’s day—especially if they were unfortunate enough to have her as a customer, or (even worse) his first wife, who’d given him two daughters only to break his heart with the reveal she’d been cheating on him with his cousin for the entirety of the marriage. 

So, in the end, we’d ended up in a storybook world where my parents had divorced ages ago and my dad had since married Lucas, a white-haired, ethereally masculine beauty whose young-but-ageless sylphlike grace perfectly complemented Cliff’s rugged, bearlike manliness, and they’d settled down together for an amorous life of happy parenthood. 

I eyed the Lucas in the picture, those vivid dark-blue eyes seeming to gaze right back at me like they were more than ink-stained paper. The more I got to know Lucas in person, not just from the false retconned memories each reality gave us but face to face and being to being, the more I started to feel like maybe there was something literally incredible about him. Like, his elfin beauty and penetrating stare betrayed an origin or a nature that was somehow more than merely human. 

So far, I was pretty sure only I was aware of the changes I had made—and, it seemed, of changes made by someone else in my body, at least this time around. Something in Lucas’s eyes at the cake-cutting had made me wonder, though. Was his slight misalignment with the idea of being purely human a sign that he had a broader of view of things? Did he notice this reality exiting the merely possible and “going live”? 

I shook my head. Leave it alone, dude. Dad was so happy in this set-up, and the last thing I wanted to do was question anything—not if there was a chance of rocking the boat and taking away what I’d accidentally given him.

I grimaced, remembering. It wasn’t up to me anymore. I made a mental note: Not screwing things up for my dads—one more thing to talk to my replacement about. 

In front of Cliff and Lucas was… well, me. Henry, as I—he, I guess—was in this reality. Thanks to the slow changes instilled in me by Thad’s special breeds of cannabis, a process I only really saw the extent of in retrospect, I’d ended up growing taller and more ripped in a Michelangelo’s David sort of way over the two years or so I’d been buying from the Hashery. My junk had grown, too—and so had my ego. People had started noticing me, celebrating my hotness. People were always coming on to me at the store where we worked, or taking pictures, or telling me I should be a runway model or a PicThread influencer or something. I know for a fact my amplified, long-legged allure had gotten me a raise and a promotion I might not have gotten otherwise. A friend sold me a nice car for cheap just because I would look good in it. I’d known it was going to my head and had decided to enjoy the ride, sure it was my due after years of getting what I saw as the short end of the stick. I’d kept all that as I’d changed things around me, though my phallic obsession meant I was sporting bigger and bigger cocks with every reality shift I took us to, as well as eventually making myself a sexy-image-themed social media influencer for real, like a tool. 

The Henry in the picture was a sexy, sexy man, tall and visibly buff with longish auburn hair, blue eyes, and a startlingly handsome face that was still recognizably a version of the same young man who’d sat stiffly to one side of favorite-son Kevin, glowering under lowered brows, in the original-reality version of this pic. The muscles were more a sculpted evocation of Greek ideals than the huge and hard physique Eric had ended up with, the thick fabric of the yellow-and-purple rugby shirt clinging to the curves and swells in a way that made my mouth water and my hands itch to touch. Even seated the impressive bulge was noticeable, tastefully but obviously hinting at the two impressive cocks packed away behind a straining zipper for the family photo-shoot.

Flanking him on either side were the four identical Kevins, smiling gorgeously into the camera, and it was with an unsettling wrench that I remembered that I was now one of them and not the boy in the middle, booted out of my body by my own shenanigans. It had seemed like such a clever scheme. I had thought I was leveling up, swapping into the body of an eight-foot muscle giant for a while (without consent) before crafting even greater pleasures for myself—only to get shoved into a copy of my older brother’s bizarrely sexy body by the person I’d completely unwittingly passed my powers to in the swap. Of course if I’d known my ability to control the cannabis-transformations Lex accessed was biological, a fluke configuration of my physical Henry body, I would never have left it behind for a second, but then that’s exactly the kind of thing mythology teaches the arrogant and hubristic. 

So now, “Pex” was in my old Henry body, and I was, bizarrely, an identical quadruplet, owing to all three of the giants having been shoved, in this reality, into copies of my brother Kevin. The weirdest part of this very weird situation was that, given the retcon nature of the reality shifts, this was now the way it had always been. There had always been four of us, we’d always (improbably) looked exactly identical, and we’d always been very affectionate with each other and with our cocky kid brother, Henry. We all had different birth names, of course, but because no one could tell us apart, not even our parents, we all went by “Kevin” and we all lived more or less interchangeable lives, sharing berths on sports teams and taking turns going to classes we were enrolled in and having a blast riffing on every part of living a jointly-executed life together, teasing everyone around us and keeping secrets that only the four of us knew. 

We knew which ones we were, naturally, and could usually tell each other apart, more I think from gut feeling than any visual cues like moles or other anomalies; but my memories told me that we didn’t use the birth names either. Instead we went by birth order: K1 was the firstborn, K2 the next to arrive a couple minutes later, and so on. I was pretty sure I was K4, which made a certain amount of sense aesthetically. The original Kevin was probably K1, and then there had been the three ex-giants. First of these was Rex, who had just shown up at the Hashery one day; then Lex had ended up like him shortly after; then Pex (I think?) had been created as a clone of Rex. He was the last of the giants to arrive, as it were. I’d taken his body; the giants had been converted to Kevins in the latest universe shift; ergo I was the last of the Kevins.

In the portrait, the Kevins were arrayed on either side of Henry, two on the left and two on the right, all wearing identical green-and-blue rugby shirts. What was striking about the family being grouped in this way was how much the Kevins looked like Lucas, despite Cliff being our actual biodad. The cascading white hair the four of us shared was particularly noticeable… though on closer inspection it was more of a platinum-blond next to the pure snow white of Lucas’s locks, and our eyebrows were a shade or darker, adding to our visual appeal, while daddy Lucas had sleeker, pure-white brows. Our handsome faces were angular and symmetric in a way that seemed to recall Lucas more than Cliff, too. Was it all a coincidence? Had I trumped genetics with my choice of universes? I had no fucking idea.

Then again, going by the portrait, apart from the hair our strongest resemblance was with Henry. All the Kevins had our younger brother’s nearly 7-foot stature and lanky, easily muscled body, though Henry’s was thicker and more like a gymrat fitness model’s than the Kevins’ were. And, this being a reality I had helped create, all five of the boys were smuggling puppies in their jeans—secret twin anacondas, girthy and excitable, as I could presently attest from the snuggling 17-inch erections currently raging persistently under my shirt. That part definitely came from Cliff’s very potent genetics—though we’d never had actual sex with our dads, they’d never been terribly shy, and if there was anything we Kevins knew about our hairy, brawny, confident, selfless biodad it was that Cliff’s twin wangs, even flaccid, were even bigger and thicker than ours were fully hard.

I considered the panoply of Kevins in the portrait. I had a vague sense that we were lined up in order in this shot, which meant that the one on the right was probably “me.” Maybe that explained the slightly surprised expression? I snorted. Maybe I was reading into things.

An arm slid around my shoulder. “Admiring yourself, bro?” asked a smug voice. 

I turned and grinned at my identical brother. K3, I thought, though it was more of a feeling than a certainty. He smelled faintly of pot—someone, or someones, had been having a toke. Nice.

The back of my brain was still churning away, trying to get a stronger bearing on the nuances of this particular universe, and had already flagged a potential problem. If he was K3, then theoretically he was actually the former giant Lex. But then… how did that work, in this reality? Everyone else but me and Pex—and maybe Lucas?—was mentally as well as physically retconned. This reality was all they knew. If K3 only remembered being a Kevin, growing up over an entire lifetime as one of four identical brothers, then… what was it even possible for him to be “really Lex”? 

But if there was no Lex, what did that mean in terms of Lex’s access to the pure primordial forces that he had been uniquely able to tap into whenever he was stoned on Thad’s most potent breeds of pot? If K3 wasn’t “really” Lex anymore, then my old ability to divert us down the tubes of my choosing was completely moot. It didn’t matter if the steering potential was attached to the physical body everyone knew as “Henry.” Without Lex’s raw access to the primordial forces, there was nothing to steer. 

Maybe… that was a good thing?

I admired the duped, slightly stoned face in front of me, feeling an odd sense of relief. “Wouldn’t you be, bro?” I teased back. 

Kevin smiled easily and slipped further into my personal space, casually melding his mouth with mine. Our arms wrapped naturally around each other, and I felt up Kevin’s tall, firm body with easy appreciation as our erections pressed comfortably against each other. His mouth and breath definitely carried a strong residual flavor of cannabis smoke—probably the everyday Hashery blends that had improved me and Eric slowly over the course of years rather than the premium stuff that had let Lex and me plug into the great beyond. 

However chagrinned I was by my past hubris, uncertainty was not something I dealt with well, either. I decided I needed to test out—as inconsequentially as possible—whether my identical bro still had Lexabilities in this universe. Unfortunately, that meant that I first needed to have a chat with the current occupant of my former Henry-bod, and I was not looking forward to it.

I pulled free from the kiss feeling slightly flushed, gazing into blue eyes that stared playfully back at mine. “What’s up, bro?” I asked, nuzzling his double-boner with mine. In the previous round of reality selections I’d giddily given my Henry-body these awesome twin boners that were almost like a single fat double-headed cock until you slid your tongue or a lubed finger between them, making for some very interesting fellatio and buttfucking. It wasn’t much of a surprise that Kevin had ended up with them too—which meant that in this reality all five of us had this… arrangement. Now that I’d kicked myself out of my own body I was suddenly very glad I’d been so generous with the cockflesh in all my previous universe choices.

Kevin smirked, his lips already looking pleasantly debauched from the brief kiss. “One and Two are getting up a soccer match in the back yard with everyone,” he said, eyeing my mouth with the same shameless ardor with which I was eyeing his. “I promised I’d come find you.” 

“Yeah?” I said, feeling a heady rush of raw lust slither through me, stiffening my already-hard cocks even further. “Did you… promise to bring me back?”

Kevin licked his lips saucily. That tongue drew my entire focus. It was long and deft and almost irresistible… just like mine. “Nope,” he said proudly, popping the “p.”

I grinned, and then we were kissing again. Somehow we managed to pull off each other’s shirts almost without breaking our snog, and only the dim awareness that there were more than fifty people milling around downstairs, some of them not family, stopped us from fucking right there in the hallway. Instead we slipped smoothly into a nearby bedroom (one of ours) and closed the door firmly behind us. Henry, I thought, could wait.

After the cake the rest of the day was a bit of a blur. Our family group sort of broke up and dispersed, and I ended up talking to Amir and Bill, who had just arrived, for a while. They had had to run some kind of “errand” after paintball, one that had left them looking slightly disheveled and with lots of smiley side-glances. Bill was shyly apologetic for missing the start of my party until I hugged him tight, then gave him a big smooch with tongue just to get a reaction from Amir. He crossed his arms over his chests and gave me a cold look, but I just winked at him and we carried on. It turned out Bill was finally moving out of the b-and-b he’d been staying at since arriving and would be taking up one of the derelict cabins up the mountain by Amir. Amir would be fixing the place up, which I took to mean that there would be a certain amount of shared space with Amir until the new venue was habitable.

I gave Amir a couple of hugs, too. He took them stoically. As far as he was concerned I was a decent guy but also this self-important influencer wannabe, which he didn’t much care for. I played into this a bit just to needle him, taking selfies with his Amir-bodies glaring behind me like they were my big, four-armed bull-like bodyguards while Bill stood to one side, laughing behind his hand. Finally they very deliberately wandered off. No sooner had they left than three of the Kevins reappeared from somewhere, stinking of very good weed. I hoped it was the regular stuff—I’d had enough reality changes to last a lifetime! Plus I was the one driving now and I wasn’t very good at it, so, yeah.

The Kevins hugged me, the hunky triple embrace quickly devolving into sloppy pot-laden kisses. Can you get a contact high from making out? Not sure, but they felt amazing and I came very close to shooting my load all over them before they pulled back, laughing—this was evidently a thing they did, ganging up on their cocky kid brother and goading me very nearly to a spectacular release before backing away like it was all a big joke. I didn’t know how the old Henry would have reacted, but honestly I didn’t mind. I loved edging and the sustained feeling of being hard and close, and being around the Kevins all stoned and aroused, in quantity as it were so as to compound the effect, was a blessing. 

The Kevins were the kind of stoner that wanted to do things while they were high, always trying to start some kind of activity (or find a place to eat vast quantities of food), and some animated conversation about possible exertions, noting all the active and sporty types present, led to a consensus that a soccer match would be an ideal birthday-culminating event. One of the three was dispatched to find the remaining Kevin, while the rest of us gathered up the teams. Bill joined in, as did Cliff and Lucas (in opposition to each other) and my now-stepsisters, Cliff’s daughters from his first marriage, Jill and Lana. Eric and his brothers signed on as well, all of them looking a lot more suited to a bruising game of NFL football than a bit of backyard soccer, and a number of other friends, cousins, and coworkers. Everybody was having a great time at the party and capping it off with a game sounded prime, both for those eager to play and for the rest content to watch and cheer. In the end we had plenty set to start, even accounting for the fact that the other two Kevins mysteriously never reappeared.

I was kind of anxious and giddy about playing. I, meaning the guy who had once been the Thad/Rex clone jocularly called Pex, had never played soccer in my life—but the Henry in my fake retconned memories had, all the time, and had intimate knowledge of the moves and strategies honed over hundreds of weekends playing with brothers and friends. I was scared and thrilled in equal measure to have a chance at trying to live out things that “I”—the “I” I was now—was naturally good at, even though objectively I’d never so much as laced up a pair of cleats. Theoretically it was a fascinating existential conundrum, and physically I felt an actual craving to play, like my body was as up for soccer as it was for sex.

It was a bit awkward at first, and I had to sort of learn to let my memories come to the fore and not fight them, like the Ninth Doctor suddenly remembering he could dance after all; but we were all just laughing and mucking around, anyway—it wasn’t like I was starting for the England team in the World Cup or anything, though the Kevins especially knew all the rules and kept us to them. I got into it fast. By the time we were twenty minutes in I was fucking Renaldo, and I was stoked to be playing well and having fun exerting myself with all these happy people. Actually compared to the rest of us Bill was the real Renaldo, Messi, and Becks rolled into one, a genuine soccer prodigy and a joy to watch just from how much he loved the game and the way his talent lay not in running rings around us but in leveraging the team and stoking enthusiasm for the play as a whole. 

Those legs, though. The last few rounds of changes had given us all some pretty sweet bodies, but Bill’s firm, sculpted thighs and calves, powerful and elegant without being overly bulky, were two of the most captivating examples of masculine lower-body form I’d ever had the privilege of seeing. And that was without taking into account his round, perky butt. How that ass managed to be simultaneously athlete-strong, worthy of the cover of Sports Illustrated, and at the same time the perfect round, eminently gropable twink bubble-butt to slap onto the splash page of your new premium pretty-boy porn site, was one of the finest mysteries of our admittedly contrived new reality.

Eventually the game finished with shouts and cheers and a cooler of ice upended over the obvious MVP, Bill. Everyone started packing up and heading out, and I spent a solid half-hour hugging people goodbye and accepting birthday wishes, despite being bare-chested and sweaty (we’d played shirts versus skins, and my side was inevitably skins) while the two Kevins—the other two were still AWOL somewhere—gamely took turns posting pics and clips for my rabid social media fans. Finally it was just the family, and there were enough of us that taking down the pavilion and cleaning up the back yard barely took any time at all.

Before long I found myself leaning over an upstairs balcony, a mug of hot chocolate in my hands as I watched the stars flaring to life in the inky sky behind the majestic mountains. The Kevins had disappeared, perhaps to find their two counterparts, and I was comfortably alone.

“Hell of a view,” said a voice. I turned to see Lucas joining me on the balcony, and I smiled. His beauty was even more ethereal in the half-light, his white, flowing hair appearing just shy of luminous.

“Sure is,” I said cheekily, looking him over. 

He smiled, slightly smug, and wrapped an arm around my bare shoulders as he took a spot next to me. I was tall in this body, around 6-foot-10, but Lucas and the Kevins were all a match for me—only Cliff was shorter. He watched the stars with me for a while, both of us enjoying the proximity and the company. Finally, he said, “How are you adapting?”

I looked over at him, and in those vivid blue eyes I could see the truth. He knew everything. Everything. 

Suddenly I felt a prickly rush of guilt. “I should ask you that,” I said. “Isn’t it weird having a son that suddenly… isn’t your son?”

“You are, though,” Lucas said patiently. “You proved that today. You are Henry. That’s just… not all that you are, or were. Or will be.”

I was intrigued. Lucas was close, It felt like he was giving me this intimacy freely, as a gift. I was turned on in body, but also in mind, the way I had been in my memories as Thad, discovering new challenges and questions in the quest to breed the perfect cannabis. Now, my deep curiosity was no longer so narrow. 

I met his steady gaze and asked, “What else are you, Lucas?”

His blue eyes twinkled, and his lips quirked slightly. He had a long, straight nose, and he moved forward slightly, brushing it along mine. Suddenly my hard-as-fuck cocks throbbed as though they’d never truly experienced arousal. “Shall I show you?” he whispered, his tone teasing.

Just then another strong hand wrapped around my waist from the other side, and I turned to see handsome, brawny, bearded Cliff—the definition of a DILF, and in my case literally. He was shirtless, too—he’d played on my team after a crowd of admirers insisted he be on the shirtless side—and like me hadn’t bothered to reclad himself. “Happy birthday,” he said, squeezing me tight and kissing my shoulder. “Did you have a good day, son?”

I grinned, looking between them. “The best,” I said honestly. “Thank you.”

“Back atcha,” Lucas said softly.

“Anything for our sons!” Cliff said, squeezing me again. “C’mon, you two. I’ve got Top Gun cued up and ready on the bedroom TV!”

My fake/not-so-fake (?) Henry memories told me this was an annual birthday tradition since I’d turned 18, snuggling in between my dads in their bed while we watched homoerotic movies. The real Henry, who’d mocked all this up, was, it seemed, a certifiable horndog and a bit of a perv, but I didn’t mind—Cliff and Lucas were each the absolute embodiments of their own kind of extreme hotness, and I loved the idea of being sandwiched between them. 

I grinned and hugged Cliff back, stooping for a quick kiss. “C’mon, then. You got the hash brownies?”

Cliff feigned incredulity, though I could smell the special aroma of chocolate and cannabis wafting in from their bedroom behind me. “Hendric Noah! All that food and cake, and you’re still hungry?” Cliff exclaimed, slapping my flat, chiseled belly. “What will your fans say if these go away?”

Lucas chuckled, still gripping me from the other side. I hugged him, too. “I don’t think he has to worry,” my other dad joked. 

We went in together, arms around each other, the perfect end to a perfect day.

I waited almost two full weeks before heading back up to the Hashery.

At first, I’d made up my mind not to go back there at all, except as a customer. I’d been very solidly plunked down in this life, and it was exceptional. Here, I was a young, seven-foot-tall internet sex-god, with the yummiest muscle body, the sweetest smile, and the tastiest snuggly-twin monster dicks on the planet (and that included all the time-sucking diphallic porn out there, in this world as bland a kink as bukkake or pierced nipples). I had a big house and an awesome new truck I loved driving through the windy mountain roads with the windows open and the wind whiffling through my long auburn hair. My four randy, identical stoner-hunk brothers were even hotter and hornier than I was and were an honest-to-god joy to be around, whether we were out doing something crazy as a bro-gang or holed up in the den smoking seriously potent weed together. Great friends were crowded around me, including a best bud, Eric, whom I knew from my new memories had been there for me forever, and whose beefy, expanded muscles were close enough to impossible you could get off just staring at him while he grinned back at you. And then, of course, there were the two hottest dads in alla Colorado, one a big, solidly muscled, hard-bodied DILF and the other a lithe and lanky white-haired smirker with a few extra tricks up his sleeve. 

That said, having been around increasingly hot and augmented men for a lot of years, the biggest change might have been all the love being poured on me from all directions. Sure, a lot of it was layered onto fathomless depths of hot, unslakable passion, but all of it was genuine, honest love. For a guy who’d deliberately isolated himself for a lot of his life, it was almost a culture shock.

It was an adjustment, but not a difficult one. I found my feet that first day, at the birthday party—and I mean that literally, seeing as I was playing an exhilarating game of soccer at the time with friends and family and discovering my “fake” memories as Henry weren’t a threat to my own persistent sense of who I had been and how I saw myself. Lucas, my elfin-handsome stepdad, had later confirmed my gut feeling. I didn’t have to lose what I had been, but my new memories were as honest and true as the ones I had brought with me. I could be a synthesis, retaining both who I had been and the form and life I had slid into like a glove. By the time I went to bed that night, cuddled between my dads while watching brotastic flicks on the big screen in the bedroom, I knew what I wanted to do: I would live this life, remembering who I had been along both paths while moving forward and enjoying the hell out of every thrill, toke, and fuck this dream-perfect reality had to offer.

Maybe we’re not meant for utopia, though, human nature being what it is, because it only took a few days for something to start niggling at me, subtly disrupting my otherwise perfect life. There was a lot of casual cannabis in my life: a few puffs in the mornings with my dads from a shared joint, delivered shotgun style; long sessions with my four brothers that ended with us all getting seriously high on the strong stuff; live feeds up the mountain roads with Eric while he drove and I toked. All of it was good, and all of it, in a way, was mine. Sure, now I was Henry; but before that I had been Pex, and Pex was a clone of Rex. And (unknown to anyone but me) Rex had secretly been Thad, returning home in a borrowed body after the original Thad body had ended up being occupied by a duplicate version of my pizza-impresario brother Mike. 

Yeah, okay, it’s complicated, but the point is, ultimately the years of memories I had brought with me were mainly of being Thad, that obsessive breeder and perfecter of cannabis that altered the human body in ways no one had ever imagined. That drive, that need to work with cannabis, to experiment with blends and grafts and the infusion of materials and processes to alter the leaves after harvesting—all of that was still in me, was still a part of me. I was smoking weed as a powerless consumer, an end-user, and more and more I yearned to tinker, to expand, to play with the infinitesimal workings of a leaf I knew better than my own hand. There were things I wanted to try, experiments I’d already mapped out before that trip to Mike’s and new inspirations that kept hitting me at all the wrong times, like water balloons from an invisible nemesis.

Then there was the existentially unsettling fact that Rex himself no longer existed. He had been blithely and completely transformed into Kevin #2, with no memory of being anyone but Kevin; and that seemed to matter to that corner of my brain that wasn’t letting this go. Rex couldn’t be Thad anymore. That Thad was gone, which basically meant I was the only Thad left. Aleksei was gone, too: he was Kevin #3, with only memories of identical partners in boyish misadventure and a hot fifth bro they loved to share the love with in every way imaginable. 

I worried about these impulses. Frowned at them, tried to push them down. That fact that I wanted to find a lab and a microscope and line up a set of samples felt disconcertingly retrograde, like some part of me wanted to revert to that insular, unrewarding life that had cost me so much love and gratification. I should have been happy. As Thad I’d felt old for 25, but my 23-year-old Henry-body was full of energy. I slept soundly and woke refreshed, ready for the day’s adventure. Everything I did felt new and fun. Heck, just feeling up my perfect, sun-dappled body while I sucked off my gigantic pressed-together rock-hard cocks under the big oak tree in the backyard should have been enough, let alone the rest of it, but my perverse brain insisted there was something missing. 

Lucas was watching me this whole time. He was somehow aware of my dual nature and so was clued into my inner conflict in a way no one else was. He stayed with me, solid and ready, as my new life kaleidoscoped comfortably through boisterous outings and languid lazings-about with my various crews. 

Finally, there came an afternoon when we were walking in the park, just the two of us, both shirtless and sharing a mild but very effective joint. As we wandered I took occasional selfies of us for my always insatiable PicThread feed, giggling over a fan-sponsored poll that asked whether my abs looked tighter than they did a month ago. (Well, it was Hashery weed I was smoking, even if it wasn’t the special blends, so it wasn’t outside the realms of possibility.) Most of the responses were snarky complaints that you couldn’t see my abs properly most of the time because these two extra-large you-know-whats were always in the way; that thread in turn led to a petition for a proper abdominal photo shoot with the annoying obstructions in question moved aside somehow for a better viewing, the means and choice of helpers being left to my discretion. I snorted, posted that I’d give the request due consideration (immediately getting a torrent of likes and the usual enthusiastic comments), then put the phone away for a while.

We stopped at an overlook and stared out silently at the urbanized valley below for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, as my mind settled. The wind was gentle as it slid around us, bringing with it the resonance of earth and rock and thriving trees from upmountain. It was peaceful here, looking down over the muted, bustling city, and being with Lucas always had a calming effect. I found my worries focusing and my thoughts seemed to clarify. The venue and the company seemed to be having a positive effect. Maybe that’s why gurus are always up on a mountain in cartoons, I thought, amused. Though generally they don’t have their hot dad with them to keep them company. Or do they?

After a while, we smiled and turned to each other, hugging without words. The two of us nuzzled close, my hard cocks rubbing gently against his ridiculously long abs. As our exceptional bodies pressed comfortingly together, in my head I heard an echo of his advice from the night of the party. You are Henry. That’s just… not all that you are, or were. Or will be.

I was Henry, but I was also Thad. Some part of me wanted to explore and manipulate cannabis. That was who I was, just as much as I was this soccer-loving hot-bodied roué reveling in a purpose-built, carnally epicurean existence.

I sighed gently against Lucas’s neck and hugged him tighter, kissing his sun-warmed, cinnamon-scented skin, and he did the same. I would need to go see Amir… and I would need to do it as that punk Henry, the kid he thought was full of himself and nothing but trouble.

It was going to be an interesting visit.

I took my new cobalt blue hybrid Toyota up to the Hashery that Saturday, thoroughly enjoying the ride the whole way. The truck had a unique place in my affections, partly because it was a generous b-day gift from my loving dads and partly because it wasn’t a preexisting part of the life I’d stepped into. I had chosen and taken ownership of this splendid, sweet-looking, fuel-efficient machine. It was mine, personally, in a way the big house, the always-flattering clothes in my closet, and my weird life as a viral PicThread star were not. Just being behind the wheel of this purring beast as I tore down six-lane highways and powered around winding mountain roads sent a steady thrill through me that reverberated very nicely through my generous 7-foot muscle-bod, right down to heavy balls and the thick, stone-hard dual-unit hard-ons poking low between my subscribe-worthy pecs and occasionally sliming my aesthetically smooth sternum as I drove.

As I pulled into the parking lot I found myself gaping through the windshield at what I was seeing, sliding into a spot and parking the truck almost on auto-pilot. The Hashery was not quite as I remembered it. As Thad, I’d overseen the construction of the shop as a modest addition to the two-story farmhouse I’d bought along with (what was more important at the time) the acreage behind it. As Rex I’d returned to it in the midst of a thunderstorm, and it was looking exactly the same then as before. But we’d all been slid between universes a few times since then thanks to an unprecedented convergence of body-altering, mind-linking weed; a guy with an unexpected talent for latently linking to a metaversal nexus of inexplicable power while high on said special-breed pot; and a hedonistic boy whose ability to control shifts between universes had gone to his head before an ill-advised body swap with yours truly had lost him the ability and served him his just deserts. There was one aspect of these reality shifts that I’d missed in all the chaos: every time, the Hashery, like Henry’s dicks, had grown bigger and bigger.

I got out of the truck, pushed the door closed, and sort of stood there a minute with my hand on my nape, processing. The shop, originally, had been a very minor addition to the side of the house and constructed to look like an extension—same roofing, same off-white siding, and only a few elements like the glass double doors identifying it as anything but residential. The size and shape contributed to the add-on feel: it was about the dimensions of a large two-car garage, just over a thousand square feet. There hadn’t even been a sign, word of mouth doing most of the work until a regular customer adept at woodworking had created a three-by-two placard that read “Thad’s Hashery” in a pleasing script and sans serif combo. We’d proudly hung the placard by the doors and later licensed the design as a logo for tee-shirts and other merchandise. It was your basic home-grown business, and as Thad I’d given it the minimum necessary thought as I focused on my plants and blends and (rather egoistically) left things like county regulations and payroll to Amir and Aleksei.

Now, everything had changed. I wasn’t Thad, or Rex, or Pex anymore; I was standing by my new truck in a new body, my Henry body; and the Hashery wasn’t the same, either. 

In this universe (the “Henryverse,” as I thought of it, for lack of a better term), in place of a simple garage-sized shop joined to the house there was a full-grown, mid-sized standalone retail store. The thing easily 5,000 square feet, with blue siding and big plate-glass windows showing off the wide range of cannabis and cannabis-adjacent products to be had inside. A few broadsheet posters were mounted inside the glass on either side of the wide front doors, advertising deals on hot-air popcorn makers and Unstoppable Steve (always a popular strain for the mellow-jazz kind of high it tended to give) the way a grocery store might tout fifty cents off bananas or two-for-ones on butter-flavored Crisco. There was even a light-up sign over the entrance, a configuration of well-rendered front-lit LED fascia lettering all in gentle blue and white, announcing that the inviting, well-lit retail space within was indeed THAD’S HASHERY. 

I felt a shiver up my back as I gazed up at the unfamiliar signage emblazoned with what had once been my name. “Thad,” as such, technically didn’t even exist in this world anymore. But the store had taken on a life of its own in “his” absence, even growing bigger and stronger as though the store itself had been smoking and receiving the effects of the secret-drawer special blends the whole time. 

What made it even weirder was the familiar and mundane context around it. The house was the same, and the grassy acreage rising behind it looked the same from what I could see. Eerily, even the logo used for the signage and posters (and presumably the merch) was the same, passing between universes like a secret whisper from one cosmos to the next. 

The parking lot (larger, too, than before, and better paved) was more than half-full. Saturdays were busy here, just like they’d been before, but the customer flow was bumped up a notch or two. A steady trickle of patrons were entering and leaving the store, a lot of them youngish, well-built guys in handsy, laughing groups of two or three, with or without shirts to show off their personal variations on the ideal masculine form. Some were cheekily sparking up on Hashery gear even as they headed for their cars, though it was clear at that that anyone driving knew to abstain until they got home. Everyone looked healthy, tall, and buff well beyond any normal baseline, and handsome, too, as they joked and nudged each other entering and leaving the busy store.

I stood there a while, just watching. Well, the expanded version of the Hashery here sure helped explain the substantial increase in male hunks per capita I’d noticed in this version of Colorado, compared to what I remembered. We’d gone a fair way toward buffing up the local populace before, over the course of a couple of years, with that world’s one-notch-hotter-than-hot version of Henry being one of the star success stories; but here beautiful, tall, deliciously built guys were literally everywhere, and a lot of them were smoking doobies that I was guessing largely originated from the successful landmark store in front of me. I’d gone to the frickin’ DMV last week with Cliff to pick up his license renewal, and there’d been at least ten guys in line and three behind the window I’d have gone to Bali with for a weeklong fuckfest if anyone had asked.

Then again, how much of this beefcake prevalence was our leveled-up body-upgrading pot, and how much of it was down to this whole reality being the brainchild of a seriously horny gay twenty-three-year-old, I didn’t know. Certainly, bigger, fatter, and harder cocks were the standard here, not to mention dual cocks like mine and my brothers’ being rare but normalized; and the baseline height and buffness of guys worldwide seemed stepped up, along with a simmering constant homoerotiocism that led to more unreserved groping and bro-kissing than any given episode of Dante’s Cove.

This was one wild reality.

At length, I headed into the store. I pushed through the glass doors, hearing the familiar tinkle over the doors, and after spending a minute just kind of marveling anew at the size of the place and the dozen or so customers milling through the aisles I headed for the main cashier station, ignoring the hum of excited attention I was gathering from the people that recognized me from social media. Catching people’s attention as I walked through a crowd was already becoming a part of the routine, though I was still getting used to how Z-list internet celebs like me were supposed to interact with rabid media-consumers who knew not only exactly who I was but pretty much every inch of my body, better than I did (being new to it and all) and over a substantially longer period.

The register was being manned by Bill, who I have to say was looking very edible in a yellow body-hugging World Cup soccer jersey, the tall cocks pressing against his abdomen a stealth presence only faintly visible behind the fabric. Mine were always visible when I was boned. They touched the bottom of my sternum neatly enough but bent forward in the middle slightly, making wearing shirts over them awkward; and wearing shirts under them mostly ended up staining the shirts. So I usually did without, as now. But on other guys I found the hidden-cock look very sexy—especially as in this world the cocky shirt-lift show-off move was as much about peek-a-booing a hard cock or two pushing past the waistband of your jeans as it was flashing your hard, rippling abs. Hell, I’d seen Tom Holland do a lightning-quick version on a viral video, flashing a grin and hard tool nuzzling his lower abs as he’d entered some club or other, and right then I wanted Bill to do his own T-Holl quick and cheesy shirt-lift reveal in the worst way.

I waited to one side as he finished bagging for a very tall, very cheerful brown-skinned Adonis with no shirt, a looong, lickable torso, and a heavy, fat cock-bulge that went down to his knee in his camo boardies. The hottie was buying three sealed one-pound family-sized bags of Red Sequoia, the dominant component of which, as I remembered, was a strain as being specially engineered to focus on height and cock length. Well, that blend works as intended, I thought with a smirk. Though, that being said, it was also true that the effect of pretty much all of the Hashery’s own-brand cannabis products seemed to have been intensified in this reality. That kind of growth on the basic stuff we sold was an extreme outlier in the original ‘verse. Very few had gotten that big that easily with the original mild-effect street-facing formulations, but here it was almost commonplace to be… a little past the usual boundaries of normality.

Bill gave the customer a big sexy grin as the tap-payment went through, and then, to my astonishment, he pulled him in for a brief but thorough kiss that made the monster in the guy’s camos twitch with pleasure. I remembered that Bill had been gifted with two extra-long tongues and gulped, pushing down a warm frisson of envy, even as my own pressed-together cockheads jerked left-to-right between the lower reaches of my pecs like a polygraph needle recording a small but significant fib. The customer loped away a moment later with a wide smile and a slightly awkward gait.

“Got one of those for me?” I asked. 

I’d been teasing, but Bill responded with a happy “of course!” and slipped over to pull me into a slightly longer smooch that set a wash of heat through my perfect bod and a wad of spurting precum up my eager cocks. He did indeed have a double helping of tongues, and the way he deftly slid those long pleasure-muscles around my own felt like a hot and sensual threesome was going on in my mouth. When he stepped back I was just that little bit dazed, and his pale cheeks were showing a bit of flush as well. He glanced down to admire the small smear he’d helped cause on my lower sternum and smirked, briefly licking his lips with both tongues. I shivered.

Feeling a need for reciprocity, I said, “Okay, you gotta lift your shirt.”

Bill wiggled his brows at me. “Only if you film it!” he said. It was almost in a sing-song, like he was quoting something. I must have looked confused. “It’s a video channel I follow,” he explained. “There’s this Youtube guy, really sexy and popular like you, and one of his bits is where he goes around to hot guys on the street and in stores and whatever, and he says ‘Show me the goods,’ and the response is always, ‘Only if you film it!’ It’s like a catchphrase. Of course, some third dude is already filming it, but the guy always grins and pulls out his phone, and we cut to his video of the guy showing his stuff. Like this!” He demonstrated by lifting his shirt, though only for a tantalizing split second.

“Ugh, now you’re just taunting me.” If he wanted to film it, I’d film it. I got out my phone, then hesitated, noticing there was a customer waiting to check out. I nodded his way and said, “Maybe you should—?”

Bill glanced toward the customer, who grinned. He was the shaggy-haired kind of stoner, with a big bulge in his jeans and a tight, long-sleeve navy tee that hugged his lightly-muscled torso well enough for me to notice that his nips seemed more like cockheads than I was used to seeing. There was a basket by his size-14 tennies, piled with bags of pot and four different kinds of munchies.

Stoner customer dude grinned wide at us. “Shoot, man, I’d pay to see this,” he said. “A sexy counter dude flashing HashHunkHenry? Be my fucking guest.”

All right then, cockhead-nipple stoner dude was a fan. Cool. I winked at him and raised my phone, but Bill lifted a finger. “Let’s do it properly.” With quirked lips, he called toward the open storeroom door just behind him. “Hey, Amir? Can you come out here a second?”

One of Amir’s bodies emerged from the storeroom, looking massive in a tank top that had to have been specially designed for pec-stacked guys like him. (Were there pec-stacked guys like him? Probably.) He looked calm and genial, at least for him, until he saw me. His expression tightened into one of disapproval, like a gourmand who’d just been served a big, smelly plate of mac-and-cheese from a box.

Bill pretended not to notice. “Hey, would you film us? It’s for a thing.”

Amir narrowed his eyes but pulled out his phone, if grudgingly. Some part of my brain was hamster-wheeling the oddities of this universe, and now it was off on whether both Amirs carried a phone or if we’d gotten the one that did by accident. I muted the feed as best I could and focused on the scene about to play out.

Amir wordlessly thumbed his phone, then looked up at Bill. He turned to me, grinning. That was my cue. “All right then,” I said. A little stagily, because it was an homage or whatever, I said, “Hey dude, show me the goods!”

“Only if you film it!” Bill responded immediately. I dutifully lifted my phone and started my own video. On the screen I zoomed in as Bill, more slowly this time, lifted his yellow soccer jersey to reveal a smooth, very fine premium craft-brewed eight-pack and two hard, beautiful cocks, a little red around the foreskins. Mine were mashed together side to side, so they almost acted like a single cock, but Bill’s wangs were separate and individually compelling; though they also overlapped, a configuration that seemed to demand concurrent fellation. I wanted them in my mouth so bad I lost track of any other thoughts—that is, until Amir’s hand reached suddenly into the shot and firmly yanked the shirt back down, filling the screen with sweat-wicking bright yellow polyester.

Stoner customer dude laughed and applauded loudly. After a couple of weeks of being an “influencer” and filming everything that happened to me, it was already second nature for me to swing the lens his way and record the reaction. “That was awesome,” he said, grinning on screen at Bill and Amir as he clapped. “Flash-blocked by the jealous b-f! I love it!” 

I chuckled and ended the vid, putting my phone away. I glanced up at Amir, who was glowering at me, his phone already out of sight. 

“Cool,” Bill said. To me he added, “I’ll make sure to send that to you, and you can edit it together and post it. Your fans will love it.”

“Definitely,” customer dude concurred.

Amir was scowling and seemed about to turn away. All at once I remembered why I’d come here. My original plan had been to get Amir alone and confess everything—who I was in my “past life,” how I wanted to work with pot, the whole schmear—but suddenly that seemed unwise, and my window was vanishing. Quickly, I said, “Hey, Amir? Are you… er, hiring?”

Amir’s eyes went flinty, and he crossed both sets of arms over his sizable chests in that move I knew he used all the time to intimidate people into shutting up and going away. Before he could shoot me down, though, cocknipple stoner dude broke in. “Whoa, HashHunkHenry workin’ at the Hash? I’ll be here every week!”

I glanced at the guy, who seemed simultaneously genuine and savvy enough to recognize the value Amir might place in a potential customer draw like me, both in person and on my vids. I was a little conflicted on that point, as my preference was to work in the greenhouse over the more visible front line; but we’d figure that out if it came to it. One step at a time. 

“We could use the help,” Bill chipped in, nodding toward the store. A few more people had come in, and a couple of smoldering-hot gymnast types in matching blue and red tees that looked like they had to be sized extra-extra-extra-tall were now queuing patiently behind our helpful new friend.

Amir’s face said he understood exactly how useful I might be publicity-wise, and the way business was going they probably did need more hands. Finally, he grunted, “Monday?”

“You got it.”

Amir humphed off into the storeroom. Bill was beaming at me. “If I come work here, you’ll have to flash me every day,” I joked.

“We’ll see,” he said craftily, like he was brewing his own plans. 

I grinned and turned to stoner customer dude. “Thanks, man,” I said.

“No prob. Can I get a selfie?”

“Absolutely.” The three of us crowded together over the counter and I took the shot, posting it instantly, then we shared a quick three-way kiss before Bill finally checked the guy out. Waving, I wandered off, heading for my truck. This was a bizarre world for sure, but I no longer doubted I had a place in it and a path to simple happiness as a man who knew who he was, one way or the other.

It was midsummer, not long after Henry’s big birthday bash. I woke up suddenly in a quiet hour when the whole house lay asleep, grasping at strange, inchoate dreams about other worlds and altered realities.

I lay awake in the darkness, breathing quietly. Behind me, I felt the familiar presence of my identical brother Four snuggling close under the sheets of my king-size bed. I don’t even know why we Kevins had four bedrooms between us (well, two suites technically). We were seldom alone, day or night, and we’d always coupled off for everything we didn’t do as a group since childhood. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d gone to bed without one of the other Kevins with me, occasionally with Henry between us. Two Kevins or a Kevin sandwich—that was the ideal. We even tried doing the four of us in one bed a few times, but the more of us there are in one place the more our sex-brains take over, which ends up meaning a lot of spunk but not so much sleep.

I nestled against Four as he slept, listening to his soft snores and enjoying the warmth and strength of his muscular arm wrapped around me, cupping my chest like that’s the natural place for a sleeping hand to be. His half-hard cocks were my ass nuzzling contentedly as usual, gently riding the tracks of mostly-dried cum from a casual pre-slumber humping. A shared toke (we’d found a Hashery blend that didn’t keep us awake, though it did make our nipples oddly sensitive for a few hours) and a mutual climax, however achieved, was our favorite way to end the day, and the only variation usually was who was behind whom.

Of course, often our nightly release was more involved and, shall we say, athletic than the butt-ride Four had given me the night before, but we’d all been agreeably wiped from a long late-evening bike trip the seven of us had taken (the four of us Kevins plus our studmuffin influencer-hunk bro and our variously DILFy dads), and afterwards in bed we felt all heavy and pleasantly torpid, the exertion tingling pleasantly in our thighs and calves making us the languid kind of horny. So we settled for the quick nut-and-cuddle scenario. I’d cum pretty quickly, shooting my twin loads into a convenient towel—we brothers always had a stack by our beds in easy reach on both sides; but Four had just let go, painting my crack and well up my spine with his warm K-spunk before sidling up close against the mess with a big smile on his face as we slipped off into a deep, afterglow sleep.

The same thing was going on down the hall, I was pretty sure, with Kevins One and Two doing the same in One’s room—in other words climaxing quick and easy against each other before falling off into the cozy abyss at exactly the same moment we did. We tended to do a lot of things synchronized, whether we meant to or not.

I wasn’t sure where Henry was, but I could usually sense my three fellow egg-mates. Not like a GPS dot on a map or anything—it was more that I got a faint resonance of kind of where they were and a weak echo of what they were up to, in a ghostly way and on the very fringes of my consciousness, almost like peripheral vision of the mind. It was stronger after a few puffs of the good stuff, though, especially if we’d all shared the weed together. Which was most of the time, ‘cuz we liked doing stuff together, either in pairs or all four of us as a sexy copy-and-paste gang.

That was one of the reasons I was uneasy being the only one awake in the middle of the night. It was a cool night and we had the air off and the windows open, with the heavy bedsheet and my brother’s body heat providing the perfect level of comfort in harmony with the mild breeze wafting around us. My attention focused on the night noises seeming through the window from outside: a gust of wind ruffling the leaves of the little swath of suburban woodland behind our house; the faint hoots of a distant owl on the hunt; the nearly imperceptible hum of traffic on far-off highways. I moderated my breaths, inhaling slow and deep and letting the exhale out just as slowly. The trailing edge of the smooth high from our nightly joint helped blunt the stress I would have felt from not falling back into the easy sleep my brothers shared without me.

One thing I was sure of: the itch in my brain keeping me awake had to do with the weird dream I’d been having, the one that I couldn’t quite remember. Something about reality, and the five of us. The others, too—there were lots of random glimpses. The clearest image I remembered from the dream was of Bill running across the field during our impromptu soccer game, looking like he was born to show off those amazing, perfectly shaped legs.

There was a lot more. That dream, or some detail or aspect of what I had dreamt, had something a part of my brain wanted to hold onto. It was like I had a tiny locked door in my head somewhere, and I had dreamt the key… only to have it slip through my fingers and dissolve away in the destructive transition from sleep to waking.

As carefully as I could, I slipped out of Four’s embrace and got up, enjoying the give of thick pile carpet under my big bare feet as I padded across the shadowed spaced, headed for the extra-large bathroom shared between our suite and the other Kevins’ set-up. Once the door was closed, I flicked on the halogens, blinking in the bright light, and emptied my bladder as I thought. I was a little aroused from cuddling my hot bedmate, enough that my big, heavy cocks were slightly chubbed, but not enough to inhibit a bit of lizard-draining. Even in this state, our dual cocks tended to twist loosely around each other as they hung low and ponderous. The soft pretzel twist was enough of a thing, we used to joke about how if we had three of these long-ass pocket monsters we’d end up doing nothing but having slumber parties and braiding our cocks while we smoked weed and giggled about boys… assuming they stayed soft enough to braid properly with all that skillful handling. Then again, all four of us Kevins—Henry too—knew from “hard experience” that once they were stiff and boned they got wrapped around each other even more tightly, so maybe they’d braid naturally when we were rock hard and ready to leak precum all over each other’s hot, tight bodies.

It was funny, actually. Hard or soft, our wangs cuddled each other even more tightly than we did. Maybe that’s why we coupled off all the time—we were just emulating our cocks.

I glanced toward the extra-large shower (with room for five!) and smiled. Because of the twisting-dick thing, our dads warned us all early on about making sure we were extra-clean in-between our twining shafts. Other kids got reminders to wash behind their ears; we five got told to soap up real good between our dicks. (We learned much, much later that when it came to the tribulations of having twin and twisty cocks, daddy Cliff was speaking from experience.)

Of course, we still followed this wholesome directive with commendable diligence, often enlisting the reciprocal help of any nearby brothers that happened to be around to ensure maximum phallic cleanliness.

Finishing, I jiggled, wiped the tips, and flushed, then moved over to the sink to wash my hands. As I did so I looked into the mirror. I guess most guys see someone distinct from the rest of the world when they peer into their bathroom mirror—someone they see there and only there, a sole companion to their uniqueness. When I did it, I encountered the same handsome, sun-warmed, snow-haired face I saw on my three identical brothers. It was a face I was deeply in love with and for which I felt a powerful craving that burned so deep sex barely quenched it. Mirrors were a frustration because I was used to being able to kiss that face, nuzzle that sharp jawline, and grasp those bulging bare shoulders, feeling their firmness under my eager hands. Having a mirror was almost like having a fifth Kevin, one I could never actually touch. All I could do was stare longingly into those brought, beautiful blue eyes and lust after lips I knew for a fact were the sweetest I could imagine, while my cocks snapped to near-instant erection, lengthening and hardening in the space of a heartbeat to their full 17 inches of leaky, intertwined desperation.

Hands slipped over my shoulders as another pulse-poundingly attractive Kevin-face appeared in the mirror, his white-blond hair brushing across my shoulders and mixing with my own. I suppressed a moan and closed my eyes, leaning back against my hunky, well-built doppelganger. He slid his arms around my chest as his hard cocks nudged between my cheeks and against my lower back. Warm lips brushed against the skin under my jaw, which suddenly felt extremely sensitive, and my cocks flexed against my chiseled belly in response.

“What has you up at this hour?” Two purred against my neck, holding me tight against him.

“Mmm,” I hummed, then answered, “Weird dreams.”

“Yeah?” Two said. He sounded surprised. Maybe I was the only one experiencing hard-to-remember slumber-visions of alternate realities. Our waking lives overlapped completely, so the idea that our dream worlds might diverge was strange and fascinating. “What about?” he asked, brushing his pale midnight micro-beard against my skin in a way we both knew sent shivers up the spine.

I opened my eyes and saw the two of us in the mirror. This time they looked like duped versions of us, glimpsed through a window into another place. I didn’t know what to tell Two exactly, so I clasped my arms over his and closed my eyes again, feeling the strength of his well-packed biceps under my roving thumbs and his powerful chest against my back. “Oh, you know,” I murmured. “Us four. Henry. Bill’s sexy legs.”

Two snorted in amusement, giving his heat-radiating, steel-hard cocks a little thrust that left my spine feeling smeared and wet. “Doesn’t sound too weird,” he said. “Those definitely are the best legs in the state.”

I hummed again in agreement. I wanted to turn around and start making out slow and deep, maybe for an hour or two, but there was no hurry. This was nice, too. It wasn’t about cumming for us, not really. All four of us seemed to enjoy physical contact while aroused as much as any climax. Cuddling, kissing, fucking, it almost didn’t matter. Just being hard and intimate together was enough, and if we were high, too, even better.

Two must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said, “Hey, wanna get the others and do some weed? I found some extra-special stuff.”

I opened my eyes and found his in the mirror. “Yeah? What did you find?”

“That bag of special blend that was in Henry’s extra-special birthday cake,” Two said. “Remember? It’s called ‘Ganyede Zeta’ or something. At least that’s what it says on the bag. There’s still a third of it left—plenty to share around and talk about sexy-legs Bill. And all our other sexy friends,” he added in a teasing tone, as if he weren’t just as crazily turned on by the attractive guys we knew as I was. Starting with us brothers, of course. And those hot guys in the mirror.

I bit my lip. That name, Ganymede Zeta, triggered something in me, like an echo of an echo. I tried to hold onto it—it felt like whatever it was lurked on the other side of a wall I couldn’t see, and if I could find the wall I’d understand. But then another voice just like mine and Two’s interrupted my thoughts from the doorway to my suite.

“Sounds good to me,” Four said. I glanced up and saw an identical platinum-haired hunk eyeing us, his monster tools raging stiff and damp. Carnal desire fired in his magnetic blue eyes. From the opposite doorway, the remaining clone-bro was giving us exactly the same look, leaning naked against the jamb with arms crossed over his heavy Kevin-pecs.

I let out a soft breath—and in that moment my breath was the only thing about me that was soft. The four of us together was always a recipe for sly smiles and all kinds of heated playtime, sexual or not, and that night our burgeoning desire felt as strong and potent as it had ever been. Seeing our roused and randy bedmates wanting us like that, their blue eyes dark with deep appreciation, made me shiver in Two’s warm, hard-cocked embrace with a kind of slow-yearning pleasure. Under the heat of that simmering communal passion whatever I had been trying to remember flittered away like a tiny gray moth vanishing into the starry night.

There are a lot of things that heat my blood. I’m the first to say it. These reckless reality shifts that some self-absorbed universe-surfing punk kept foisting on us, though, they got my insides burning almost more than anything else. Every alteration to the world I could spot was ludicrous and stupid and a clear demonstration that the brains of whoever was responsible were all in his dick. I wavered between hating that I was even aware of them when everyone else clearly wasn’t, for reasons I couldn’t even begin to fathom, and a kind of dark gratitude I was in the know so I could be good and angry about them whenever the mood struck me.

Cannabis—our cannabis, the secret kind that Thad had developed before he’d gone and fucked off out of existence—was clearly involved. I don’t blame the cannabis. My life is cannabis. I’m up to my elbows in cannabis every day, and I have a lot of elbows. I work for the top source of premium pot in the Front Range, and I do it for a reason, because honestly, the more joy cannabis brings, the better. I give it a smoke myself on occasion, usually on my days off after dealing with the irrepressible sorts I seem to be surrounded by. So, yeah. Whoever it was that had kept fucking with the truths of the universe—and I had some ideas as to who it might be—was bent in the head in a way that had nothing to do with him smoking a few specialty-blend joints.

Given this deep-seated antipathy toward them, it bugged me no end to have to admit anything good could have come out of those sophomoric world swaps. I try to avoid it. Sure, having two big, hard-packed bodies to cuddle Bill with from both sides, now that he was staying in my bed (just until the reno on his cabin was finished), was… it was nice. More than nice. Okay, it was the best thing in my life, ever. Soccer Boy was an excellent snuggle, all tall and athletic and pliable like he was made to be pressed between someone like me. Having him between my bodies made me feel oddly whole in a way I hadn’t known since that day a few weeks back when I’d suddenly discovered, much to my exasperation, that I was, for some reason, no longer a monocorporeal being.

So of course, our friendly neighborhood pot-smoking Reality Fucker had to go and mess it up.

Maybe it was fate, but the night before we’d shaken things up. Bill, for once, was insisting on sleeping on the outside of our little threesome so that I could experience the deep, relaxed joy he got from being the one in the middle. I resisted a little, reminding him I’d be half the bread as well as the sandwich filling; but Bill’s pretty stubborn under those heartwarming, cock-hardening smiles of his and in the end I relented. There’s not much I wouldn’t do for him—not that I’ll ever let him know that, and you’d better not tell him.

I awoke on my side, squinting into the bright morning sunshine streaming through the window with both sets of eyes as usual. I felt hazy, as though I’d been smoking weed all last night and was still experiencing the after-resonance, or someone else’s.

I took stock of my unaccustomed position, experiencing simultaneously both my breath on my own neck from behind, and the smell of the neck in front of me. Right—we swapped things around last night. Something was wrong, though. Bill was not in the bed, but the sheets on the other side of the bed were rumpled and pulled back, and I could hear noises from the en-suite bathroom. That wasn’t it. My gut was telling me something was off, and it was something to do with me.

I lifted the covers and looked down at myself. My torsos were as expected: two stacked rows of dark-skinned, heavy pecs, each with a complement of impressive-looking delts and a brace of thick, powerful arms. Below were long, flat abs largely hidden by a side-by-side pair of ridiculously wide cocks I could never seem to get soft these days for very long. My hands itched, wanting to reach for them and make them shoot achingly ecstatic streams of hot cum, but I shoved the thought aside because it was below my bizarre but familiar torsos that things got strange. Specifically, the fact that I had only one set of long, brawny legs down there. I had one set of legs for both bodies, instead of the usual and entirely to be expected one set each.

During the night my lower halves had suddenly, and without warning, decided to merge together again—but only my lower halves. I was monocoporeal again, in a way, but just from the waist down with two torsos above. And two heads, as before, occupied by a single consciousness. A single, angry consciousness.

I growled low in both my throats. “Fucking reality changes,” I muttered viciously.

“You say something, A?” Bill called from the en suite.

Suddenly, a thought hit me and I was filled with alarm. Throwing aside the covers, I leaped up and ran to the bathroom, not even noticing the shift in my center of gravity as a two-torsoed man. My thoughts were all on my beautiful, sweet, always determined Soccer Boy. If I was changed again, what about him? Fuck these shifts. I loved him the way he was, and if—

I got to the en suite and stopped in the door, staring. Bill was standing in front of the vanity, admiring himself in the mirror, but my eyes were directed lower. I felt stunned. I had lost a pair of legs, but Bill—Bill had taken up the slack.

“What did they do to you?” I murmured, though my annoyance was more out of the principle involved than any true objection to what I was seeing. What I was seeing was, in fact, extremely erotic, and if I hadn’t already been achingly hard I would have boned up in a second.

Bill looked at me in the mirror in concern, then, seeing where I was staring, twisted to look at his creamy, round hind caboose. “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning his hindquarters this way and that to get a better angle. “Is there a bug bite or something?”

I gazed in a mix of awe and umbrage at his beautiful hard ass and those four long, well-honed legs. In this universe, as before, they were the legs of a committed athlete, though here they were somehow even more masculine and gorgeous. As a miniature forest of four they were twice compelling, the sleek bulges of well-shaped muscle exquisite—quads, thigh biceps, calves, every curved expanse shaped to maximize their raw erotic appeal.

They were dangerously sexy. More men than ever before would covet them and want to touch them, and even as I took them in I was filling with a kind of anticipatory, crimson jealousy. I subconsciously vowed that those legs were mine and only I could truly enjoy them. His feet were strong and alluring, the rear ones just inches from the heels of the front pair. As I watched one of the ones in back moved up and forward to fondle the Achilles tendon of the smooth ankle in front of it between the big toe and long second toe, and my pulse quickened with warm arousal at the sight.

And then there was the ass. It was even more fantastic than before, white and round, firm and flat on the sides, and so obviously the result of training and exercise and countless hours running and kicking soccer balls. I couldn’t say why, but it was more arousing to me curving all the way around to the short horizontal back instead of the normal upward switch at the coxxyx.

There was another ass underneath, too, half-hidden between the two sets of legs and no doubt worthy of future exploration, but my attention was all on the one in front of me. It was, in short and in my experience, the most ideal, fuckable ass ever.

My cocks all squeezed hard against my cobbled abs. They wanted in.

“No,” I answered finally, looking up to meet his eyes as he looked over his shoulder at me. “Your ass is fucking perfect.”

He grinned slyly and turned to face me. He was a bit taller than I was, but not enough that I had to crane my necks as he closed the distance between us and gave me a long, delicious kiss, first in front and then in back. When he stepped back, he was stroking my faces with a look of aroused wonder in his eyes.

“I can’t get over how handsome you are,” he cooed.

“Come on,” I said. “You’re the handsome one.”

“That’s a fucking lie,” Bill persisted with a grin. “It’s almost not fair that I get to look at two of these faces at once, but I’m not complaining. Hell, if we hadn’t cum like five times last night, I’d be spitting spunk all over you right now.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m not—” As I spoke I glanced at the mirror and froze. “Holy shit,” I whispered.

“See?” Bill laughed. “You’re the hottest guy ever. I bet if you got pulled over and you put paper bags over your heads, the cop would still blow his load just looking at your driver’s license.”

I could almost believe it. I moved closer to the counter-wide mirror, stroking my own faces in amazement. I had been reasonably good-looking before, not that I had ever used skin-care products or worried much about my hair or beard beyond the occasional trim. Now, though, I was startlingly good-looking—enough that I was suddenly close to cumming just looking at myself, and the effect was astronomically intensified by the fact that there were two heads and associated muscular shoulders instead of one. I probably made guys hard everywhere I went. My cheeks and jawline alone were so exquisite I could stare at them for ages. My eyes drew me in like a magnetic force, wanting to give me the pleasure of orgasm.

I still looked my age—or at least, you could tell I had more life-experience behind me than my young, pale, extra-horny lover peering over my shoulder with pride in the mirror; but everything attractive about my face was almost supernaturally intensified.

And there were two of them.

“I always said you should be the PicThread star, not Henry,” Bill commented, watching me admire myself.

I balked at the idea of spending my days taking selfies and pandering to the fans for eggplant emojis instead putting food on the table with honest physical labor and a bit of Excel spreadsheet management after hours. “Fat chance,” I said.

Bill watched me critically examining my reflection for a beat. “Hey, can you mirror-kiss?” he asked suddenly.

I frowned at him in the mirror. “What?”

“It’s like this thing, maybe one percent of the population can do it. You kiss your reflection in the mirror, and it feels like you’re actually making out with another you. Tongue and everything.”

I snorted. “Someone’s been spending too much time on the internet.”

Bill was uncowed. “It’s really rare, like I said, but it seems slightly more common around here for some reason. I can’t do it, but the Kevins can.”

I turned my head and eyed my tall, hunky young lover skeptically. “You realize the Kevins are identical, right? They were probably kissing each other.” And I would have loved to be there for it. The sudden explosion of Kevins at the party, adding three extra dupes of Henry’s extremely hot and playfully horny brother to the world, was one of the, well, less objectionable universe alterations I could think of… though it was still stupid.

“I’ve seen it,” Bill persisted patiently, nuzzling my rear shoulder under his chin as he wrapped his arms around me—one around my back torso and the other around my front, as was probably his habit in this reality. I liked it. A lot.

“And you weren’t all high at the time?” I prodded, trying not to smile. It was the Kevins’ thing, after all, and the Hashery weed was pretty powerful.

“Only a little,” Bill said coyly. “Come on, try it.”

It was impossible to resist this adorable man, however surly one’s innate disposition… especially when he was all cute and persistent like this. Signing, I leaned forward and pressed my mouth against my reflection’s… and got the shock of my life when I felt my reflection kiss back!

I tried to jump away, shocked, but Bill, whose considerable muscle-weight was pressed up against me from behind, wouldn’t let me get too far from my reflected face. “Keep going!” he urged.

Swallowing, I drew forward again, and my lips met those of the other me, the one in the mirror. It was soft and warm—real lips, as real as kissing myself had been when I had two bodies. Except this time I could only feel one side of it. I deepened the kiss, and I felt my own tongue test itself against mine. The sensation was electrifying. I pushed in more, letting our tongues slide together, and I realized it really was a “mirror” kiss—the me in the reflection was doing exactly what I was, only flipped horizontally along the plane of the mirror.

Maybe it was the impossibility of it, but this strange kiss was unexpectedly exhilarating. I was already close, and Bill behind me was rutting his long rigid cocks against my ass, getting off on super-hot me hissing myself in the mirror.

Abruptly, I realized I could watch too. I opened my rear-head eyes and was so overwhelmed by the sight of me kissing my mirror self that I was instantly awash in irresistible heat. My balls tightened and my body tensed. I grunted, “Fuck, Bill, I’m going to—”

“Yes! Yes!” Bill said, humping me harder. My heavy balls tightened and all four of my too-wide cocks stiffened with imminent release. In seconds then we were all cumming, blasting white hot jizz all over both my backs and the sink and mirror, too.

I separated from the mirror and fell back against myself and Bill, languidly relishing the feel of our cum-messy Bill-me-me sandwich a lot more than I would have expected.

“That was hot as fuck,” Bill panted. “Next time, we’re going to film it, and I guarantee you’ll go viral so fast it’ll make Henry’s head spin. He’ll be shooting spunk from all three cocks when he sees that.”

I turned in Bill’s embrace, hugging him close with all my arms and closing my eyes to enjoy the intense afterglow with him. “No filming,” I murmured sleepily. “I am all yours, and you are all mine. The internet can go fuck itself.”

Bill hummed his agreement. We held each other like that for a long time. Later, I’d figure out who our reality shifter was and give him a piece of my mind, but right then I was willing to lay back and enjoy his handiwork, just a little. For now. I could be angry tomorrow.

I sat in the Hashery parking lot, shirtless and hard, staring up at the big marquee and wondering just what I was doing there. The whole time people were filtering in and out of the warehouse-sized pot emporium, mostly a wide range of hot young guys in twos and threes, while novorock boyband Two Directions crooning its all-gold playlist over my truck’s killer sound system provided a suitable “guys are fucking hot” soundtrack. Most of the milling crowd weren’t 7-foot double-monster-cocked Buffs like me, packed with firm, elegant brawn and brimming with enough high-intensity hormones to seduce a dozen everyday normal-sized hunk-dudes in one go. They were just regular run-of-the-mill hotties, ready to be seduced if I chose to do so.

Even as Buffs went I was slightly exceptional. My big, beautiful, perfectly proportioned, raging-hard dicks got their own page in the R18 print run of my junior college’s freshman directory (not-so-slyly subtitled “New Meat”), and everyone joked that it should have been a fold-out. My long, rippling run of chiseled, hair-dusted abs had just as many admirers. My sea-blue eyes, cerulean with a tint of deep, cool green, were enough to get some guys panting and still with sudden, yearning desire, and my talented tongues made half my dates blow their wads the moment we started making out. I was, in short, everything dudes liked and then some. So why was I parked here feeling like a busted cartoon jalopy in a showroom full of Porsches and Lamborghinis?

It wasn’t like I was in love with my boytaur crush, Bill, or anything. Sure, my dicks got all hot and leaky just thinking about him and his perfect ass and thrilling tetrad of soccer-boy thighs; not to mention that dreamy sculpted torso with the enticing little flare as you dragged your eyes up to his fallen-angel smile and sweet, pretty eyes. Truth was, I was horny even for a Buff. I got that randy for a lot of guys. I even came a few times thinking about that hairy, brooding Adonis he was into. With that double-helping of fuzzy, stone-hard, four-armed torsos and those faces like a god—fuck, Amir was so hot, I would have bet anything he could mirror-kiss on top of everything else. When even your reflection can’t help snogging you, you know you’re at the top of the sexy pile. Imagining the two of them together—

I shuddered, forcing down an orgasm while Liam, the double-headed lead singer of 2D, filled the cab with his aching one-man harmony. The problem wasn’t that I wanted Bill or Amir enough to get between them (well, maybe in the literal sense). I wasn’t that dude. The problem was that every time I got high on premium Hashery weed—which was most afternoons, when I could afford the good stuff—I had these crazy-realistic visions where Bill was… some other Bill. Well, he was Bill, but a regular two-legged Bill, not a sexy boytaur. And Amir, instead of being double-torsoed, was one of those outlier Multis with two completely separate bodies, each with the stacked chest and four arms he had now on his twin, extremely distracting torsos.

What I couldn’t wrap my head around was how much those visions felt real to me, like I was visiting the place I’d been living in all my life before I’d been yanked into wherever I was now. The sense that that was reality and this… wasn’t?… lingered a little, too, even after the high faded and I was sober as a judge—which was a damned eerie thing to have rooting around your gray matter all day. My job at the Belvedere didn’t exactly occupy all my attention. Pot was my usual distraction, except that pot was the thing that was taking me out of the world I should have been taking for granted as my own.

It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t know what to do about it, either. I’d been too scared to tell anyone. Seeing strange things when you’re high wasn’t weird, obviously; but being convinced they’re as authentic as apple pie or the Arkansas six-legged goat sure was. And my gut was insisting exactly that—that when I’d met Bill, in this version of events, I’d fixated on his two perfect legs and pretty much got off on how much I wanted to caress them with my stare, and then my hands and tongues and the weeping trails of my oh-so-covetous cocks. And that obsession had been possible because, in that moment, he’d been a Buff, not a Multi… no matter how much my memories and my fucking eyes told me otherwise.

The only thing that tracked about all this was that Bill was at the center of it all. He was that kind of guy, always the hub of whatever was going on around him.

Sometimes, when I was really baked, I saw yet another take on the concept of Bill: an everyday hunk version who barely reached six feet and had only the one long dick and a single tongue to kiss and suck on. That imagery felt just as real, though it was more distant somehow. It was as though the reality in question were further away, receding gradually into the infinite black like the speeding galaxies of an expanding universe.

A sharp rapping on my window startled me out of my thoughts, and I looked up guiltily to see Ryan, the hot-bodied pharma salesguy staying long-term at the guesthouse. He was cocking a thick brow at me as he leaned back against his Land Rover, having parked next to me after following me up here from the Belvedere for his first proper taste of Hashery weed.

Ryan was only 6-foot-3 and very twunky in an old-money scion sort of way. I liked his look a lot. He was this messy sandy blond with sunglasses perched above and eyebrows a few shades darker, and he had this gymnast-hard body he was showing off with the tightest possible snow-white henley and subtly distressed jeans—a bod was, as I’d recently learned in detail, very nice and extremely flexible. He was, no lie, the only bed partner I’d ever been with who could legitimately take both my big dicks up his ass, and he still felt as tight as a virgin every damn time.

“You coming?” he mouthed through the window. I winked, because I actually was pretty close—brimming, as I liked to think of it, as per usual. He just rolled his eyes and tilted his head toward the store. I nodded and switched off the ignition, silencing Liam’s lush self-harmonizing, before climbing out of the truck and back into my slightly misaligned material existence.

I was busy stocking the new secret blends aisle I’d set up, happy as a clam and listening to some kinky M/M/M romance on audiobook, when Amir was suddenly right there in my face looking like I’d pissed on his cat.

“What are you doing?” he shouted—in stereo, like he wasn’t loud enough already. Fortunately, I’m kinda hard to knock over, what with the four feet and all. Nimble when I want to be, stable when I gotta be, that’s me. No wonder I killed on the soccer pitch, even as a kid before I mastered the game. Back home I had my sights set on stardom—I was going to be the best boytaur soccer star since Renaldo. Then the high school soccer leagues in my county folded like a cheap tent, and the next thing I knew I was working at Burger Jack after graduation and using my perfect legs for the occasional entertainment of peregrinating strangers off the interstate. Which had led me here, so I wasn’t complaining one bit.

Amir, meanwhile, looked like he ought to be topheavy, what with the two heavily muscled, pec-stacked torsos and all; but those legs of his were tree-trunk thick, and if that weren’t enough he was stubborn enough for two mountains and a grove of redwoods. You could probably run at him with a battering ram and end up with a pile of splinters and kindling.

He was shirtless at the moment despite his own rules about the company work shirts, and it was clear he’d been out at the greenhouses all day supervising various mechanical upgrades to the irrigation and climate controls—his hairy pecs and arms were smeared with dirt and cannabis-plant residue. I was getting a contact high just looking at him, on top of the deep, boner-inducing need his physical presence instilled in me and everyone else the moment you got anywhere near him. My back boners, hidden in my snug four-legged jeans, smeared a little goo all over my taut, tangerine-sized front balls, and under my uniform shirt my front hard-ons did the same, spurting a little into the condoms I usually wore as a precaution whenever I shared a shift with Amir.

He was still glaring at me—which, I should mention, did nothing at all to mitigate his extremely intense attractiveness. Quite the contrary, honestly.

He’d asked me what I was doing, so I very deliberately tapped my earbud to pause my book, then aimed a few pointed looks at the boxes of inventory at my feet, the half-full shelves, and the store label printer in my hand before meeting his gaze again and snarking, “I’m playing blackjack at Monte Carlo. What do you think?”

Amir took a slow, deep breath with both torsos, his eyes burning—front and back. Normally he mainly “operated” the front torso, giving people a single physical entity to interact with, but when he was riled he tended to forget. “Explain,” he said in twain, with the air of a parent working to keep his agitation and concern under control and not quite succeeding.

Like he was that much older than I was! We probably could have gone to high school together. And what a trip that would have been.

Suppressing a sigh, I waved at the boxes of Herakles Lambda, Apollo Epsilon, Hyperion Delta, Ganymede Zeta, and other pretentiously named blends I’d found upstairs in the old house and brought down to add to the available merchandise. “I’m stocking inventory,” I said. “The first box of this stuff sold really well, so I’m bringing out the whole range.” I gestured to the shelves in front of me—three sections of the specials and seasonals aisle, close to the registers for increased visibility. “I moved the Tony Hawk Hashery board shorts to endcap 4 to make room.”

Amir blinked at me. “The first box… sold…?” he repeated, sounding shocked. His face darkened in alarm. “You already sold a whole box of this?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Even had a sampler party on Tuesday while you were in the city with the zoning board or whatever. The next one’s today in 20 minutes. I can’t wait. Man, I was high as fuck the whole rest of the day, and I only had a toke. This secret-label shit has gotta be, like, ten times stronger than our usual premium blend!”

Amir was squeezing the bridge of his nose like a sitcom dad, and until that moment I had no idea people did that in real life. He was doing it with both faces, which was kind of funny. “This… ‘shit’… is not like our ordinary product lines,” he said, sounding pained.

“I know, I just said that.”

Amir growled—literally growled. He met my gaze and took a step closer, finally managing to use just his front torso to carry on our little convo. I shivered and spurted a little more pleasure-gunk from my raging hard-ons just from the increased proximity. “The secret label blends,” Amir gritted out with exaggerated patience, “were specially designed for specific purposes. Even I don’t fully understand them or what they… do. We just follow the cultivation and formulas Thad left behind.”

“There’s a real Thad?” I said, genuinely surprised. “I thought that was just the name of the store. What happened to him? Who is he?”

Amir grimaced, as though this were a sore subject for him. “Thad Loukanis, master cannabis breeder,” he said with a sigh. “And he’s… away. Off on a magical mystery tour,” he added cryptically. As I was wondering what that was about he continued, “The point is that you can’t just put this stuff out on the floor. It was meant only for certain clients.”

“Like who?” I asked, intrigued.

“I dunno. His brother, for one. I don’t know who else.”

I snorted. “Well, if it’s good enough for his brother…”

“You’re not listening. He kept these blends back for a reason.”

“Why? Are they lame? Do they cause bad trips or something?”

Amir held my gaze, willing me to understand, but his super-intense, drug-like allure distracted me and I barely followed what he said. Him walking around all double-shirtless and smeared with botany grime should be against the damn law. And/or legally mandatory.

“No, Bill,” Amir said slowly. “They’re good—too good. What they are is… they’re too strong.”

I gulped. “No such thing to a committed stoner.”

“Bill—”

“I marked it up,” I defended. “I marked the shit up out of it. Still sold, too.” I leaned in conspiratorially, taking the opportunity to breathe him in as I did so. “Didn’t we need a whole new water pump for Greenhouse 5?” I coaxed.

“That’s not the point. And we’re making plenty of money,” he said, glowering around at the huge store as if it had no right to be this big and successful.

I shrugged again and went back to stocking. “A little more won’t hurt. Anyway, it’s all entered in inventory and we’re already getting requests and special orders thanks to the tasting party, so…”

After a second or two of silence, I glanced sidelong at my ridiculously sexy bedmate. He was frowning at the sealed and labeled packs I was carefully positioning and facing like he was trying to ignite the cannabis within using his unique patented death glare. Finally, he gave an enraged grunt and said, “You know what? Thad made this weird secret shit, he can clean up his own mess if he wants to.” He turned and stalked off, muttering, “Maybe this will force the self-obsessed asshole back into fucking existence.”

I watched him go, puzzled and slightly concerned. I needed to get back to work, though—lots of little stuff to finish up before the 2 o’clock event. I tapped my earbud and resumed the spiral of wrong choices being made by the streetwise but romantically inept homicide detective Basil Gimlet, all of which seemed to be guiding him into the arms of the smirking vampire underlord Vladimir “Hot Pants” Panskov and his stone-faced ex-Marine bodyguard Christian Crosse. As the seasoned narrator continued the torrid tale of sudden gunfights and angsty kisses I adjusted my near-painful hard-ons, thinking about the tasting party that would be starting shortly. If I could nudge Amir into attending… man, getting my extremely uptight and overstressed boyfriend extra, extra high sounded like the best idea ever.

Despite my little woolgathering sidequest in the parking lot, Ryan and I were still on time for the “tasting party” Bill had posted about on the company PicThread page. This was being held in the Lounge, a big room separated off the main sales floor with a cafe and noshes counter and lots of angle-back couches and big cushions where you could unbend for a while and maybe try out your purchases if you wanted. I guess the idea was, you could get baked foods or just, you know, get baked. The lighting was low and the mood was chill.

The space was already filling up when we walked in. We managed to squeeze onto one of the couches between a super-cute, seriously hairy guy in blue O.R. scrubs and a sleepy, extra-lanky Buff in a loose aqua tee shirt and multicolored jams. He was really tan, with a long mop of blond curls and a puka shell necklace, and unfair as it might have been all I could think was, “Where does he find waves in Colorado?” Sometimes, semiotics became the text itself.

They both smiled at Ryan and me as we sidled into the middle of the couch. It was a close fit, butt-to-butt and leg-to-leg all the way down, and tight enough shoulders-wise that once I’d adjusted my boners so I could sit without stabbing myself I ended up tossing my arms around Scrubs Guy on one side and my dude Ryan on the other. Fine by me!

I looked around for people I knew, but it was mostly newbies, I thought. I spotted my old friend and fellow O.G. Hashery enthusiast Henry and his massive best bud Eric in line at the coffee counter, and waved hello from behind Scrubs Guy’s back. They waved back cheerily. No sign of the Kevins, I noted. Henry’s identical brothers were probably off getting stoned on their own without any help from us.

The space was almost full up with hunks in various states of cannabis intoxication when Bill sauntered in, looking very sharp in snug boytaur skinny jeans and a tight eggplant Hashery polo, his four flip-flops flapping rhythmically against his heels. What was extra exciting was that he was practically shoving a shirtless Amir ahead of him, driving him into the middle of the crowd like a big, thickly muscled visual aid.

I sucked in a breath as I stared at the Hashery boss, my cocks flexing urgently. I heard a few moans as some of the attendees started busting a nut just from making eye contact with him. That dude was criminally hot.

Bill seemed satisfied and left Amir where he’d steered him, the whole crowd staring up at the guy with the bonerific face and the doubled, stacked-pecs torsos, while his adorably impish boytaur protégé moved to the front of the room, greeting folks he knew as he went. Amir seemed to weigh stalking out again in anger against being supportive of his lover, and seemed to choose the latter. Grimacing, he moved over to the nearest couch—ours—and glared down caustically at Scrubs Guy, who quickly scurried off the couch and down onto the floor directly in front of me. Amir dropped down next to me with a huff, not seeming to care how his wide, super-heavy rear shoulders were mashing against my delts and chest even with my arm behind him along the back of the couch. His powerful thigh mashed against mine, by itself enough of a stimulant to get anyone going.

My heart skipped and my pulse accelerated as I breathed him in. He smelled like rich, heady loam and the raw essence of living, unharvested pot. Wow.

I had to look. Gulping, I glanced down and froze, staring helplessly. From this angle I could see something I hadn’t observed before: not only did he have two slightly angled palm-wide hard-ons shoving up out of his work trousers in front, but between his torsos there was another pair of stone-hard, weeping megaboners making a complete mess of his furry, tight abs. Fuck! It had never occurred to me his rear torso might have its own set of juicy, crazy-wide uber-tools.

Then he leaned his front torso back hard against his heavy, stacked pacs, which sort of hid them from view (while racking up more deep-sexy points for him just from being able to do that). I knew they were there now, though, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I was pretty sure I could smell them, along with all of his other amazing aromas, and suddenly it was all I could do to keep from cumming.

Scrubs Guy, after a quick, nervous glance up at Amir, chose that moment to settle back against my legs and get comfortable, which didn’t help much. Then Ryan snuggled into me on the other side, and my lizard brain kept thinking this was already the hottest foursome I’d ever been a part of.

“Hey everybody!” Bill called out to us. I saw why he probably favored flip-flops—he’d slipped one of his big rear feet free and was nuzzling the heel of one of his front feet between his big toe and the toe next to it. Nice. “How you boys today?”

“We’re horny as fuck!” one of the wags in the crowd called out, causing a chuckle to ripple through the attendees.

Bill grinned. “Well, you might be in trouble then,” he cautioned us merrily, turning to gather the first round of pre-rolled joints from the table beside him. “I dunno about you,” he added with a coy glance back at us, “but weed kinda turns me on.”

“Fuck yeah,” a few people muttered. The room seemed to be charged with currents of sharp male arousal and multiple layers of cannabis, the one smoothing the edges of the other. It was a very pleasant balance, and the knowledge that both facets would gradually intensify as the session developed filled me with anticipation.

I turned to Ryan, a little chagrinned that I had momentarily forgotten him while I’d been busy reacting to the extreme potency of Amir’s presence. “You ready for this?” I asked.

Ryan’s eyes glinted. “Absolutely.”

Bill proceeded to introduce the first round, a regular-strength blend with notes of steak and sage. He sparked up a trio of very fat joints and then started them around the room, keeping up a patter as the joints moved from dude to dude about how this was the Hashery’s original blend, gently tweaked and modified over the years to enhance smoothness and flavor. I took my toke and handed the joint to Amir, who smoked it critically as if he were on the job doing quality control instead of unwinding with the guys. I was slightly disappointed when he didn’t hand it back to his rear torso to toke, and instead just passed it on to Scrubs Guy to take his turn. Probably Amir didn’t need to smoke it twice for all of him to feel it, but it still would have been funny.

I was coasting on a good, solid high from that point on as we all just mellowed together, feeling the beauty of thirty or so very aroused and very sexy men packed in close to each other with no urgent need to cum just yet. Eventually, Bill introduced a premium blend called Flex. I perked up as he talked about it—I’d tried Flex a few times when I had some extra bucks in my pocket, and it always made me feel pumped and happy. Sure enough, when the joint came around to me and I took a long draw, the potency of it seemed to go straight to my muscles, jazzing me up under the skin with the feel of a really good workout.

I grinned at Ryan, who was likewise looking buff and just a little swole, like he’d been killing it at the gym all afternoon and left with a serious pump. He was pulling off his shirt, though knowing him it was more to show off his sweet, smooth, and extremely defined swimmer’s bod than free himself from an overtight top. Me likey. Surfer Guy was ogling at him with a big smile, too—he also likey.

My peripheral vision was telling me that a lot of guys in the room were doing the shirt-doffing, but I kept my sights trained on my pharma boy. Once he got the shirt off, somehow managing not to dislodge the sunglasses still perched in his artfully no-product-look coif, he tossed the top aside and let me enjoy, giving me my own once-over at the same time.

“Nice, bro,” he said, looking me over hungrily. I guess the Flex was physically affecting me, too, or at least appeared to be, and not just in my melty, happy inner being.

I remembered who I was sharing a couch with and flopped my head the other way, offering the joint to Amir and wondering if he’d show a bit of pump like the rest of us. He was already so thick and dense-looking that the effects might be pretty minor by comparison; though, honestly, just the idea of those warm brown tetrads of stacked, furry, greenhouse-smeared pecs looking even a little swollen had me almost blowing my seed again.

Amir took a short draw—disappointingly short, from my perspective—before silently passing the joint on to a now shirtless and very hirsute Scrubs Guy. I gaped woozily at Amir as he held the smoke in and then slowly let it out, watching closely for any increase in thickness along the curves of his delts or the breadth of his luscious upper arms. All the while, I had capriciously switched back to completely ignoring Ryan, who was feeling up my chest like a teenager at a drive-in as the extra-strength cannabis went straight to his libido. A small part of me felt bad about not giving the boy I’d come in with my full attention, but honestly my neck muscles weren’t really listening to me and I was having trouble turning my head.

It took a while for the premium weed to make the rounds, but none of us was in a hurry. My stare eventually found its way back to Bill, mostly because I was curious to see what was next, but I also liked looking at him—and anyway I could still feel Amir’s delicious weight against the northeast corner of my torso while I did so, and drink in his increasingly heady, complex scents. Bill was doing the thing with his rear toes every so often, switching between his back feet, and I got caught up watching the subtly shifting muscles of his calves and thighs as he moved.

I wanted to see him run. He’d snared my attention from the outset just standing there in the guesthouse when we’d met, all perfectly proportioned head to toe like every chance of his genetics had erred on the side of “exquisite,” but him trotting up the stairs ahead of me on those sweet, sweet legs of his had boned me up so bad I was hard for days. Watching him run up and down a soccer field had to be like a day trip to nirvana. Were there videos online anywhere? Maybe on Henry’s feed? Or maybe the Hashery could organize a team to play in a local community league. Amir was right here, I could pitch him on it.

“Hey, Amir?” I started to say, already fired up on my fantastic idea, but just then Bill reached for the last set of joints in his little wicker tray and held them up, along with a sealed, hand-lettered, see-through package. It was thick and flat, a little smaller than the usual Hashery packs—maybe the size of those 10-ounce boxes of Birdseye chopped spinach my mom used to get and stack up in the freezer, I thought woozily. Only it was clearly stuffed with top-quality weed, of course, not spinach.

Whoa, did they make spinach-flavored weed? That sounded like an awesome idea. They’d rake in so much moolah off of that. Amir was right here, too. I could pitch him on it. I started to turn to Amir again, but then I realized Bill was talking and I should probably listen up.

“This,” Bill was saying, holding up the fat joints and the package of not-spinach, “is Eros Omicron. It’s part of a new high-potency ‘Secret Blends’ line we’re introducing, developed—I’m told—by the legendary Thad Loukanis himself. And you get to be the first customers to try it.”

The roomful of aroused and mostly shirtless attendees oooed and ahhed at the privilege, as excited as I was at the chance to experience something altogether new and unprecedented and marijuana-related. At the same time, I could actually feel, as though it were a physical phenomenon, Amir’s radiant umbrage upshift a gear or two at whatever Bill was up to, but he otherwise did nothing and let the events play out.

I kept my eyes on the boytaur hottie with the special weed. This was staggering, magnificent, an event comparable to the moon landings or the discovery of that tribe of sexy mermen up the inner reaches of the Amazon a few years back.

Setting aside the package, Bill sparked up the three joints and set them going in various directions around the group, while those who waited murmured eagerly amongst themselves. I wanted to use the time to ask Amir about the new offering, since he’d be more in the know than anyone else in the room; but Amir was giving off that rattlesnake “don’t engage with me or you’ll be sorry” vibe, so I gossipped with Ryan and Surfer Guy about our most extreme highs until it was my turn to toke.

As soon as I pulled that smoke in, everything changed. The whole world fell away and I was in a place that was nothing but infinite stretches of incredibly hot, naked guys of every color and kind, all twisting sinuously around each other like a 3D kaleidoscope of masculine flesh. I was beyond high and into some completely new plane of existence—and I could tell it was different because matter and flesh here had a potential malleability that became increasingly accessible with any kind of sexual communion.

I passed the joint on instinctively, barely aware of anything but my soaring pleasure. I had never been so excited. I had to engage with someone, anyone, and even as I thought this I realized I was making out with Ryan, feeling him up and stroking his fat, spurting cock. Surfer Guy was kissing Ryan, too, which was cool—Ryan was hot enough to share. My cocks were thrusting against my belly, and as time sort of detached itself and ceased to have any scalar qualities I started to realize I was thrusting a third cock, only it wasn’t in my groin—it was inside me, like I had a tight, gooey sheath deep in my guts and a big, fat, super-hard cock was shoving up and down it and giving me almost unbearable pleasure.

My make-out with Ryan intensified and so did Surfer Guy’s, and then we were cumming, all of us, only I was cumming all over my abs and also up that tight, hot inner sheath. It was connected somehow to the rest of my inner workings, too, because as Ryan and I gasped into each other’s mouths I could taste my own cum—first in the back of my throat, and then my mouth started to fill with it, just to the level of my tongues. Ryan moaned as he discovered it and our kiss got really messy as we swallowed it down together.

We came down off our afterglow high very slowly. We were still making out, though our kisses had become soft and languid. Surfer Guy was kissing him too, like he had been this whole time, and it was only gradually that I realized that this was only possible because Ryan had two heads now, side by side on his slightly broadened shoulders. Only the one I was kissing had the sunglasses, which I somehow counted as a win. I was still too stoned to find it at all weird that us connecting while we were high on the “secret blend” Eros Omicron had caused us both to actually, physically change from how we’d been only a few moments before. This wasn’t a swap of one reality for another, like my visions—this was altering the physical world with the power of sex and pot.

I smiled at Ryan, my lips feeling bruised and buzzing. He looked at me in wonder, and then at Surfer Guy still snogging him a few inches away.

He swiveled his neck back to me. “I have two noggins,” he said, then snickered, because it was a silly thing to say.

“You do,” I agreed. “You want to go back? To one?” In that moment it felt like it must be possible, though I could already sense the unreachable plane of kaleidoscopic malleability slipping rapidly away from us.

His eyes widened. With the extreme deliberateness of the intoxicated he looked pointedly down at the pair of big, hard cocks I still had on the outside, then back up at me. “Nope!” he said happily.

I chuckled. As I gave him a quick smack on the lips it occurred to me that I knew someone else with extra stuff in the noggin department, and I turned to the double-torsoed angry god to my right. I was pleasantly dazed, to say the least, and not quite able to focus on his too-handsome faces, but I gathered he was staring irritably out at the party attendees. No doubt he was thinking what I noticed later—that many of them were… a little different from before. He himself looked the same. Had he even had any of the new stuff? I had a sense he’d passed it straight on to Scrubs Guy (whose hard body was now even hairier, if that were possible), but I couldn’t be sure.

“What about you, Amir?” I asked boldly. “You, uhhh, miss having two bods?”

Amir glanced sharply over at me with both faces, his sheer personal intensity all but forcing me to see him with clarity. I grinned goofily at him, utterly delighted at his tell. I might have been majorly stoned off of barely three tokes, but even high as a jumbo-jet I could recognize a “How the fuck did you know that?” look when I saw one. With a preternatural awareness, I could somehow tell that we were both thinking the same thing—that he and I were going to have one heck of an interesting conversation when I was sober.

I stood frozen and stunned in front of the wall of Thad’s Secret Blends, feeling the first wave of real, gut-churning shock I’d experienced since I’d come home to Colorado Springs as an eight-foot, doggo-eared giant and accidentally turned my faithful second-in-command, Aleksei, into a physical dupe of my own bizarre form, sparking a wave of transformation that kept escalating and intensifying until reality itself started twisting out of recognition.

That was some weeks and several universes ago, back when the Hashery was a modest farmhouse annex quietly dispensing slow-growth weed to discerning customers, and Buffs and boytaurs existed only in niche internet fantasy. The world had shifted a few times since then.

The truth was, I’d adjusted pretty well. I’d become, perhaps, slightly inured to the men around me being more muscled, more handsome, and generally harder to resist than before. I was almost used to my new status as a gorgeous twentysomething prince of social media. My nearly chest-high cocks being exposed and hard all the time, rubbing against each other and begging to cum as I moved through the day topless and relentlessly aroused, balls churning with neverending lust, was a given. I looked forward to fucking around with my impossibly muscled and tirelessly horny ex-coworker Eric and getting stoned and snuggly with my four playful, ultra-sexy identical brothers, one of whom was so settled into his new life he seemed to be forgetting he used to occupy the Henry identity I now possessed. Like me with Thad, Rex, and Pex, it felt like Kevin #4’s onetime existence as the shy, lanky, slow-grown version of Henry who’d accidentally discovered how to use pot-linked minds to nudge reality askew was a kind of previous life, informing his personality and experience but otherwise irrelevant. As soccer-bro Bill might say, past matches are in the past. You gotta play the pitch you’re on.

The sea of men around me shifting and transforming like a sex kaleidoscope? Not so shocking. Seeing the secret blends, on the other hand—which, through the mental union of two or more users, could physically change others, and which already in the hands of the tiny handful of in-the-know insiders had produced a Front Range Colorado generously seeded with seven-foot-tall double-cocked sex gods, all kinds of sporty multilimbed hunks, identical brothers by the bucketful, and even the occasional full-life body swap—suddenly packed onto the Hashery shelves for every Tom, Dick, and Enrique to find and fuck with hit me like a fucking cattle prod. And on my very first afternoon shift as a Hashery employee!

Every sound around me—the murmurs of customers, the hum of the air conditioning, the classic rock on the P.A.—dampened and fell away. All I could hear was my own ragged breaths and the thump of my beating heart as I stared at the bulging packages of peril.

Each was carefully labeled in what had once been my handwriting, according to the mythological nomenclature system developed early on in the breeding process. Those names, and those formulas, weren’t supposed to be released from their oubliette into the world. The part of me that had been Thad had developed these clandestinely and alone as part of a plan of controlled experiments, one that had eventually come to a rather arresting fruition thanks to brother Mike and his extremely randy circle of friends and coworkers.

Along the way, Thad had gotten a new body and his actual persona and role had vanished, like Peter in The Room or Santiago from Friday Night Lights. A gap was created, with no one exactly in charge of Thad’s experiments. The old house was no longer a residence but a sort of admin headquarters. In the original Thad’s absence, the all-powerful, physically transforming, locked-away-like-a-mad-scientist’s-monster, change-imbued secret blends had been discovered by his friends and quietly shared with a handful of intimates.

I—which is to say, Rex, if I could lay any claim on the memories and intent of the person I had been cloned from—hadn’t been too worried at first. The situation was manageable and containable, in theory. Or it would have been, were it not for one of those intimates, the original Henry who’d worked a deli counter with his buddy Eric and eagerly stopped by the store with him on the regular, flukily possessing some weird genetic quirk that allowed him to meld the hyper-bred mutant weed and the communion of those wasted on it to create actual, altered realities that didn’t just affect the participants but radiated outward from them through the mundane population in shockwaves of altered perceptions, probabilities, and expectations—most of these, of course, being geared toward virility, hotness, cock, and cum.

And that was the result of a tiny knot of men even being aware of the stuff, when it was as unknown and invisible as a cryptid with no press agent. Now here it was, in quantity, stacked, tagged, and faced on the Hashery shelves like supermarket own-brand rotoni or packs of premium organic spinach at Whole Foods. In this scenario, any bunch of guys could get together, get baked on this stuff, find the mental nodes that connect their beings, and, given the right circumstances and mental alignments, just start transforming away.

Gee, good thing people never smoke pot in groups or anything, I thought snarkily, still staggered by what I was looking at.

And if any of them happened to have the little quirk that old Henry had had—what then? Who knew how common that genetic anomaly was? We could have people twisting reality left and right.

No.

No.

I had to stop this.

Without a plan, I started hurriedly pulling packs of Herakles Lambda, Apollo Epsilon, Hyperion Delta, Ganymede Zeta, et al., off the shelves and into the crook of my arm. I didn’t care that I looked like a crazy person stocking up on weed like I was trying to bake myself into oblivion before the Osiran Apocalypse. I had one goal: to get these ticking time bombs out of the selling space and away from the general public. They needed to be locked away again, so that control and stability could be calmingly reasserted.

This was why I had returned to the Hashery, I thought hectically. I was here to stop this calamity, to prevent this dangerous line of high-quality, hubris-begotten weed from spreading to—

There was a commotion around me, and I looked up to discover a crowd of twenty or so extremely high and very, very sexy dudes emerging from the back lounge they’d been using for “tasting parties” and filing down the aisle straight toward me, led by a beaming, irresistibly hot boytaur version of Bill.

I stared at him, senses glitching, arms full of overengineered pot. When the hell had Bill become a four-legged Multi? I just saw him last week!

Bill was gesturing toward me. “Look at that!” he exclaimed happily to the pot-redolent mob of male hotness. “Moments after the first public tasting of our new secret blends, and already we have an endorsement from our in-house celebrity, HashHunkHenry!”

“What? No!” I said, alarmed. But Bill was already on me. He leaned in for a deep, multitongued smooch that momentarily scrambled my brains, eliciting a chorus of relaxed whoops and cheers from his very stoned customers.

“Come on, folks!” he said, turning to them and waving my way. “Get your first batch directly from the sexy arms of our biggest supporter! You can even give him a cheeky smooch like I did! Here, I’ll film it so you can pass them out,” he added to me, deftly slipping my phone out of my pants before I could react. My hands were full so I couldn’t stop him as the boytaur stepped back and angled himself to livestream my living nightmare, a big smile on his super-cute face.

“Wait,” I said, turning to plead with him as he fine-tuned his shot composition on my phone screen. “You don’t get it. We can’t—”

Someone found my stubbly chin and turned it back toward him, and I found myself staring into the sex-darkened eyes of a tight-bodied, extremely hairy shirtless man wearing only the bottoms of a set of hospital scrubs. His excitement was coming off him in waves, along with the heady smell of ultra-strong marijuana. “Dude,” he gushed, “I am your biggest fan.” As I stared at him, momentarily stunned, he moved in for a rather nice, if very athletic, kiss. My cocks liked it a lot, surging and flexing against the plastic-encased packages as we kissed.

He pulled back with a huge grin. “I beat off to your feed all the time,” he said, pulling a double pack of Apollo Epsilon out of the glut of pot in my arms and heading for the registers.

I looked after him. “I—but—”

Another hand took my chin and gently turned it back around. This time I was facing shirtless Latino twins, or maybe a guy with two bodies—it was hard to tell at first glance, most of the time. They moved in and kissed me together, making my cocks demand we progress beyond mere smooching at the earliest possible opportunity.

They seemed to have the same idea. “You’re so hot,” one of them said. “I totally want to test drive this new two-body thing with you,” the other added, his voice as stoned and sultry as the first one’s.

I blinked at them, brain overloading. Wait—had they just now become two-bodied? From the tasting? Grabbing a couple of packages from my arms, they tossed me a dual wink. “I’ll find you later,” he said in stereo, moving off.

I recognized the next one as Bill’s Buff friend Grant, from the B&B he’d been staying at. Grant looked the same as I remembered seeing him, I thought—maybe his dicks were thicker?—but he was grinning with more than just cannabis intoxication, and the little almost-inaudible grunts he was making made it seem like he was fucking, or being fucked, or both, right there in what had previously been the Seasonal Goods aisle. He kissed me eagerly, panting as he did so, then took a pack of one of the strongest blends, Eros Omicron, from my dwindling supply. “I gotta see what else this stuff can do,” he told me confidentially.

Then he was gone, and I was looking at a sandy-blond twunk with two handsome heads, both of them fixed on me with deep awe. “Dude, do you smoke this secret shit?” he said, sounding very high. “Cuz, I just smoked it and I made a second noggin. Would that happen to you? Cuz, I wanna kiss another double-noggin dude!” Then he grabbed my neck and kissed me, not three-way as I expected but one head at a time, before grabbing five packs of Ganymede Zeta and drifting off to the tills.

More guys followed. Some were more or less normal; some I guessed were slightly modified (everyone sure had amazing pecs and at least a foot of hard cock, and probably that wasn’t as uniformly true coming in). A few were changed more radically—just from a few shared tokes, which blew my mind a little. There were a couple of newly minted boytaurs, presumably inspired by Bill, and at least one lanky, messy-haired double-torsoed guy who kept glancing back at the stone-faced, unapproachable Amir with a level of infatuation I could actually taste; though his honey-pale dual swimmer’s-physique torsos with their sleek pecs, tapered lats, and long lickable abs hardly compared to Amir’s dark, boulder-like configuration. Both his faces still had a bristly, Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo chin-beard Amir wouldn’t wear if his life depended on it, so the kid must have thought that was kinda sexy, too.

The extent of the changes from this outing stunned and stumped me. Maybe it was the effect of so many people linking in a single afternoon pot symposium? There was some precedent for that based on what Thad-me had seen at Mike’s. That was my one hope—that today’s session was a radical outlier in terms of the number and extremity of changes, just from the fact that so many people were participating and other unique factors. Had they tried different blends in succession, letting the effects build on each other? That could be a factor. I didn’t know the parameters involved, but the fact was that all of this was ridiculously unprecedented, undocumented, and uncontrolled.

Eventually, the line was gone and my arms were empty. I noticed belatedly that my chest was wet with my own warm, copious spunk, and my receptors were fuzzy with afterglow. I guess I had cum during the super-sexy kiss-fest—one of those long, slow-release involuntary orgasms I sometimes had on top of the more conventional sudden, explosive ones. Mostly I got these, I was pretty sure, because I just had way more physical need and actual cum in this body than I could get out just by blowing my wad when I actually chose to.

Bill was ecstatic, throwing an arm around me and aiming the livestream at both of us. “There you go, Hanksters!” he told my audience cheerily—he was a natural at this kind of thing. “Come on down to the Hashery and Henry here’ll set you up! See you soon!”

Recognizing a sign-off when I heard one, I smiled automatically and gave my fans a two-fingered wave, and then the stream was ended and Bill was handing me my phone back. “Great stuff,” he said. “Thanks for the assist!” A second later he was gone, hurrying toward the front to help out with the crowd at checkout we’d just helped create.

I found myself in the empty aisle standing next to Amir like it was the aftermath of a hurricane or Day One of the Rapture. The irascible twin-torsoed, stacked-chest bear was giving me a flat look that said he still didn’t like me or my “influencer” ways.

I gave him my most honest, “real guy” look, trying to ignore his compulsive beauty—another recent acquisition, seemingly, like Bill’s extra limbs. “Amir, dude,” I said earnestly. “This secret blend stuff—it’s bad news. It’s too powerful.”

“I know,” was all he said, before stomping back toward the lounge to oversee the post-event cleanup.

I stared after him. “I know”? “I know”? What the fuck did that mean? Did Amir think he had some kind of plan?

What were we going to do? Because today, a few dozen enthusiastic stoners had been given the keys to the kingdom, and that, clearly, was only the beginning. After what I had just seen, I knew it was only a matter of time before Colorado was packed wall to wall with hot, mutant guys, every one of them fucking someone else.

When my friends and I got to the car we stopped and stood there for a second, trying not to giggle. The tasting had been a revelation, and the “secret blend” superhash we’d toked turned out to have been powerful enough to subtly warp not only our minds but how we physical manifested in this strange, sexy world—yet as the high lingered, fading gently into a pleasant, slightly detached emotional serenity, our transformed bodies seemed entirely normal and it was Leo’s midnight-blue beast of a Ford Explorer Timberline looming in the well-marked parking space in front of us than seemed like the reality-intrusive anomaly. I guess when you’re gently wafting on the steady breeze of a slow-ebbing high, feeling the giddy afterglow of physical release and evolution, it’s the two-ton piles of ungainly steel inelegantly forcing energy from the dregs of the earth that seem wrong and out of place.

“Whoa,” Leo said. I wanted to snigger again. When he was high, he sounded even more like a surfer-stoner than usual. I was pretty sure he’d started leaning into the surfer look in high school—pink and aqua wardrobe, bare feet whenever possible, long wavy hair and dark shades, even the puka necklace—after he started really growing into his Buffness and someone told him most big-name surfers were Buffs. I think he swapped the terms of the premise at some level, but either way he was looking more and more like he spent his afternoons catching gnarly waves around the same time he discovered the Hashery and began following the path of the wake and bake.

I glanced up at Leo, who’d come out of the tasting a smidge taller and way lankier-looking, like he was impossibly flexible now. With my second body I winked at my other bestie, Vince, who was looking almost werewolf-hairy in his blue scrub bottoms. That time, he actually did snicker, though he swallowed it down quickly with a guilty grin, like we were going to be caught by some unknown authority figure any second.

I was still piecing together how I could look at and process things with two sets of eyes looking in different directions and seeing different things. It wasn’t that I was having any trouble doing it. On the contrary, it felt innate and autonomic, like I’d been born with two bodies instead of acquiring one through misadventure. My best guess so far was that, rather than trying to reconcile two streams of conflicting input, the information was being collected separately and then instantly merged into a single memory stream that happened to have a wider panorama of information.

Probably the same was true for my whole sensory apparatus. Smell and hearing might not be too noticeably affected as long as my bodies were next to each other. Taste and touch, though… what would that be like? If I ate a Big Mac with one bod and drank an iced mocha latte with the other, would I end up with memories of a weirdly chocolatey cheeseburger?

And… fuck, what would sex be like? Geez.

I exchanged a nervous look with myself, feeling the skin under the collar of my duped snow-white tees prickle with warmth on both bods. How would the sensations of two-bodied lovemaking gather and twine in my sole, unitary mind and memory?

And… would Andy even want that? I had to figure that most guys dating double-bodied boys knew what they were getting into when they met, seeing as they’d been born that way and had, presumably, met their dates as a two-personed person. Me, my only quirk before today was a fuckable belly button and no gag reflex.

Wait—did I still have the fuckable belly-button? The full nature of my transformation was all still very hazy (which was at least amusingly appropriate given the circumstances). What was the story here? Had the “suddenly becoming a two-bodied multi” hash-induced upgrade package included any other edits and incidentals, or was I just like before apart from splitting in two like some guy in some “oops, I cloned myself and we’re dancing to Britney” TikTok video?

My eyes dropped to the flat abs on both bodies, hidden by the tailored but not-too-snug pure-ivory designer tee I loved for how it showed off both the skin tone of my historically gorgeous Cuban ancestors and, equally, my perfectly fit and frankly enviable torso, trying to figure out the best way to navel-test myself. I mean, I couldn’t just stick my finger in right here in the Hashery parking lot, in front of my friends and half the county. Ages ago I’d chosen to demarcate my sweet little penetrative navel as a secret to be shared only with lovers.

Mostly, this was for the fun surprise factor. I liked my dates to be rewarded for agreeing to do the dirt with me. Part of it, though, was about my tio, who’d also had a deep-fuck innie, having hid his little quirk his whole life. Eventually he unexpectedly fell into a volcano at age 60 (still looking like he was maybe 35 tops, which was pretty common in my family), and his husband had gotten sloshed at the funeral and spilled the beans about his extra fuckhole, much to everyone’s shocked titillation. (My mother and her sisters were still talking about it. They’d never heard of such a thing, or so they said.)

So it was ingrained in me as a private thing—enough so, anyway, that I wasn’t about to lift my shirts and shove my index fingers in my tight, hot belly-holes in the middle of the pot emporium car park just to make sure they were still there.

I blinked, looking around. We were all still kind of standing in front of the SUV like dullards. Snort.

“Dudes,” my snakey-limber extra-tall Buff faux-surfer buddy said from behind me. “Dudes, who’s driving?” Clearly, Leo was still feeling the effects of the extra-potent tokes we’d had at the tasting. Not only did he know better than to drive in such a state, but he also was down with how when he was buzzed driving a car seemed positively unnatural to him, like purple trees or sex with a woman.

Now I really, really wanted to giggle, and was having just as much fun not giggling as I would have had letting myself giggle. “Not me!” I said in stereo.

Or—wait, was it “us” now? Such confusing, so changey. No, I decided. I was a “me.” Anyway, all the two-bodied guys I’d ever heard of were treated as one person. Even Prince Harry, and he had a claim on a “royal we” if he wanted.

Pronouns aside, though, I was getting used to my new sitch minute by minute but that didn’t mean I was at all ready to test my new quadfocal vision against crazy Colorado drivers just yet, even on the short-’n’-twisty trip back to UCCS and the cute little off-campus bungalow we’d shared since sophomore year. I underlined my assertion by moving around the car to the two rear doors, waiting patiently on either side of the monster SUV for the locks to be beeped.

Leo’s eyes lit up, looking extra-bright and the purest sky blue in the clear afternoon sun. “Shotgun!” he called out, hurrying to the passenger side and giving Vince an eager look. Leo was a supremely chill guy, but I swear he was part Labrador somewhere up his family tree.

Vince rolled his eyes. “Fine, I’ll drive,” he said. The tone of his voice sounded a little deeper and more resonant to go with his new shirtless extra-testosteroney hair-everywhere look. Probably he’d already known he’d be the only one of us who was lucid after the tasting—he came off his highs a lot quicker than Leo or I did.

Man, that body hair thing really worked for him. Especially with that build, which was already all pure USDA Grade A beef. The man looked like he’d invented rugby, wood-chopping, and fighter jets on his last day off. It made me feel a bit deficient with my fit, boy-next-door, lightly fuzzy bike-nut build (shit, I was going to have to buy another bike!)—but I was okay with that. Especially if Vince kept up the no-shirts thing outside of his E.R. shifts.

Plus, I still had “the smolder,” I joked to myself. Twice over, now. I snickered, but my companions didn’t notice.

Vince looked at Leo and raised a hand, and as he did so I couldn’t help noticing that he was covered in dark hair all the way up his corded forearm, the effect only starting to fade to clear, punk skin across the space of his wrists. I’d have to check later how fuzzy his knuckles and the backs of his hands were.

“Keys, doofus,” he said, giving Leo a pointed look.

“Oh yeah,” Leo said with a grin. He hauled the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Vince, who easily snatched them out of the air and came around to the driver’s side, beeping the locks as he went. I opened the doors and got in, tossing my little Hashery shopping bag (rust red and labeled “The Good Stuff” on the side, and boy, was it this time around) on the floor between my two sets of feet. Right then I was feeling like getting into a car from two sides at once was just about the weirdest thing I had ever done. So far, anyway.

The ride back was uneventful, but when we got back to the apartment I was feeling a little self-conscious now that my high was finally wearing off. I set my shopping bag next to Vince’s in the floor of the coat closet, with the rest of our pot, then turned and looked at my roomies. “Okay, guys, bottom line,” I said. “Does me being a Multi change anything between us?”

Leo had already collapsed onto the sofa to stretch out—maybe literally, given the ways his abs were spilling out of his loose aqua tee. He didn’t even look up as he grabbed the remote, his mess of wavy blond curls splayed around his head. “Whatever dude,” he said, tossing the all pro-soccer channel up on the plasma screen.

Vince had dropped Leo’s keys in a tray on the little table by the door and was already in the kitchen, starting the rice cooker. Fuck, his back was hairy, too, and not in a bad way. I kind of wanted to feel it as I ran fingers through the soft, dark follicles. “Oh, it changes things,” Vince said as he pulled a pack of chicken breasts and some red and orange bell peppers out of the fridge. Vince was a good cook, and he made a killer stir-fry.

I froze for a split second, my stomachs twisting. “What?” I said.

He laid out the cutting board on the wide pass-through counter that separated the kitchen from the living area and started chopping the peppers. “Absolutely,” he said, glancing up at me with a wink. “You’re paying half the food budget from now on.”

Leo barked a laugh from the sofa, his eyes on the MLS game up on the screen. “And do half the chores!” he chipped in.

“Oh, come on,” I said, putting my fists on my hips, arms akimbo, for comic effect. “That’s not fair. I’m still one guy!” A second too late I realized I said it in stereo, which probably did not help my case.

“Doesn’t change the fact that you’re eating for two,” Vince snarked as he chopped.

His remark instinctively made me glance down at my very flat bellies… which in turn got me thinking about my fuckable navel again. I felt my cheeks warm and, not for the first time, felt a flicker of gratitude I hadn’t been born all pale and somatically transparent like Leo. I shot Vince my best dual glare, not that he was looking at me. “I’m not going to eat half,” I argued. “Forty percent, tops. Leo’s a Buff, for Pete’s sake! They eat like crazy!”

“No way,” Leo chuckled from the couch. “I’m on an all-pot diet from now on.”

“And you get two turns doing the laundry,” Vince went on with a smirk as he started slicing up the chicken. “Stands to reason, seeing as you’ll be wearing twice as many clothes.”

“What? Man, this sucks,” I said, still in stereo. “I bet that hot double-torso guy that runs the Hashery doesn’t get this kind of guff from his roomies.”

Leo snorted. He looked even more relaxed, a good hand’s breadth of skin and soft, rippling abs now showing between his shirt and the elastic waist of his color-riot surfer jams. “That guy is a guff-giver, not a guff-taker,” he said, his attention fixed on some hot Brazilian guy scoring a goal for Salt Lake.

“True. You could learn something from him,” Vince teased as he worked. “Maybe he gives lessons.”

I was about to say something witty and apposite when I felt my phone buzzing in both my right front pockets. What, my phone was duped, too? So weird. I pulled it out of both pockets and looked at the screen. The notification said it was from Andy. “Hey, you around tonight?” the text read, with a winky face after.

I bit my lips. With a conscious effort I put away one of my phones and responded, “Sure, I’ll stop by after I grab a bite with the guys.” I was post-high ravenous, after all, and there was stir fry imminent. “See you soon!” Trying to ease into my news, I added two smoochie faces.

He responded back with heart eyes, and I let out a long breath. This was going to be strange. Maybe good, but definitely strange.

After dinner the bike situation moved to the top of my list, since that was how I normally made my way over to Andy’s condo in one of the nicer neighborhoods downtown. With a little arm-twisting and a promise to take the recyclables out for the next two weeks I managed to borrow Vince’s ten-speed, and I duly tooled over as soon as the wok was dried and the dishes were in the dishwasher, keeping my pace smooth and steady as always to avoid arriving all sweaty. I liked showing up with a slightly kicked-up pulse—it tended to add a little brio to things; though in this case, with Andy’s reaction to my new situation a big fat question mark, my heart-rate would have been up a notch or two anyway.

Andy liked things just so. His condo was neat and organized. In a previous decade he might have been labeled a preppie, just from the care he took with his clothes, hair, and skin. We had little routines, not because he was lazy or timorous but because these familiar turns served as solid base camps for the broader expedition of our relationship (particularly in relation to sex, but not just sex). For example, I’d introduced him to the everyday-level Hashery pot, and we’d gotten used to smoking together once a week, then after a while we’d started trying out different varieties in a leisurely sequence. We sampled each other’s favorite foods (he was into curry and naan, I loved Italian and Cantonese); then, as we fleshed those out, we started carefully branching out into different cuisines, first trying the expert versions in restaurants and then learning to make them ourselves. We progressed through the kinds of sexual experiences we were interested in exploring between us in a methodical and systematic manner, trying new things but in turn, with a plan and with a very gratifying attention to detail.

I’d been pretty seat-of-the-pants most of my life and had gotten burned by people and by misjudged opportunities, and as a result I had slowly been turning low-key anxious and wary. Andy’s solid but game approach to life was a revelation and I’d embraced it with enthusiasm over the eight months we’d been seriously dating. But it did mean I wasn’t quite sure how he’d take having a sudden wrench thrown in the works. Particularly in relation to sex (but not just sex).

Later Leo asked me why I didn’t just eliminate the problem and go see him as one of me, as it were. The truth is it honestly didn’t even occur to me. Call me a chump, but pretending wasn’t in my DNA.

Once at the building I brought the bikes into the lobby and set them aside in the little bike alcove. The usual night security guy, Rollo, was behind the desk—his title was “doorman” but he didn’t actually open the door unless you had packages or something and your hands were full—and I gave him a little wave as I headed for the elevator. He waved back, his bushy silver brows drawing together as he noticed he was waving at two of me. Then I was in the elevator, variously adjusting my backpack and wiping sweaty palms on my jeans as we rode up to his floor.

Then I was ringing his bell, and yeah, my heart was thumping something good. Andy opened the door, cute as ever even as he unknowingly echoed the intense brow-furrowing of the building’s grandfatherly doorman twenty floors below.

“Hey!” my boyfriend said. His eyes were flicking between the two Mateos, one just behind the other. Then, “Uh, hey!”

I smiled nervously (twice over), which reminded me about the “not talking with both voices” thing. “Hey!” I said, deliberately speaking via the nearer me. Then, at a loss and not wanting to conduct my revelations in the hallway, I brusquely bundled past him. Andy quickly moved out of the way and shut the door behind us.

So… now we were standing awkwardly in the foyer instead of the corridor. Not much better. To make things worse, I couldn’t get my brain in gear. All I could think was Andy looked really nice in an expensive-looking black tee, new jeans, and bare feet, like he was about to put on his boots, go on stage, and sing a chart-topping duet ballad with that sexy ex-boyband hottie Trevor Copeland or something. The contrast between his pec-hugging ebony tee and my two identical extra-snowy tees (a gift from him, I suddenly remembered) felt like an omen—a good omen, I hoped. It had to mean “complementary” and not “incompatible”—right?

Like always I was being drawn in by his beauty. He was brown-haired, hazel-eyed, and damn pretty, just a touch taller than I was and even more naturally fit—I’d already learned that he lifted weights only just enough to look like he was born buff and never had to work out in his life, not that he put it that way. It was just one of his routines. If what had happened to me messed things up with us, then—well, I’d just have to keep at it and make it right. Because there was no way I was giving up holding this body close or kissing those sweet, mischievous lips.

After a beat, Andy’s well-honed manners kicked in automatically and he reached out a hand to the body I’d held back slightly behind the other one, his clear assumption being that the one in front of him with the “hey” and the backpack must be his established boyfriend, Mateo, and the disruption I was perpetrating was introducing him to my twin brother ahead of schedule. “Hi,” my guy said politely. “I’m—”

Andy trying to shake hands with my “brother” was just too cringe to endure. “I have two bodies,” I blurted out, in stereo.

He slowly lowered his hand. “Huh?”

Still standing there in the entranceway to his condo, I started explaining—about the tasting, the “secret blend,” the way everyone’s minds linked and a whole bunch of minor and, in some cases, rather less minor transformations had been evoked in the potency of our communal transcendence, brushing against some eldrich reserve of elemental flux the pot gave our connected minds access to. As I spoke, Andy’s eyes comically widening the whole time, I unconsciously moved my other body around behind him. I think this was partly to eliminate one of me from his direct field of view, but I can’t deny I was driven by a very strong urge to sandwich this extremely sexy and alluring man that I wanted now more than ever.

I was standing close to him, front and back, by the time I finished. He seemed very aware of my bodies, but so far all I was sure of when it came to his reaction to my bombshell was a very clear and naked surprise.

Eventually I wound down, after describing the various other changes I’d seen, including a bendier-looking Leo and a decidedly furry Vince. Andy’s eyes were dark with arousal—more from the new sensation of feeling my warmth and masculine proximity on all sides, I was sure, because that was what I was feeling standing close to him.

He cleared his throat. “So, you said you bought some of this special blend?” he asked.

I nodded, blood heating with excitement. I adjusted the strap on my backpack, which he correctly intuited to mean I had it with me. “You want to try it?” I suggested, lips quirking.

He nodded slowly. “I’m intrigued by the… linking,” he said. He stared hard into my eyes, giving me the very distinct impression that testing out obscure strands of transformative cannabis was not presently his uppermost priority.

I moved slightly closer, shaving the distance between us so that his my pecs were brushing his on one side and his shoulder blades on the other. He felt physically hot through his designer tee. His raging boner slid tantalizingly against mine, long and flat and angled perfectly along his hip like he was made to be hard. I rested my hands on his hips and along his flanks.

“Before,” I breathed, “or after?”

By way of answer he fell against my lips and started kissing me like I was water in the desert. I knew the feeling—he tasted like necessity. I smashed against him everywhere, pressing hard head to toe and holding him tight with all of my strong, needy arms. My cocks rocked into him, and as we descended into animal rapture I knew that we were going to be all right. Particularly in relation to sex… but not just sex.

Oh, and, spoiler alert: I still had the fuckable navels, only now they tasted very slightly of coconut. At least, that was what Andy said. Once I was alone, I’d have to check that little nuance out for myself.

I met Bart at a fancy dance. It was an all-out on-campus swing-themed “welcome back” shindig where everyone was supposed to wear their nicest clothes and enjoy a civilized hoe-down. The traditionalists dug out or borrowed ye olde sleek black tie tuxes and cotton-candy taffeta ball gowns; the nonconformists all came in white tees and soft, butt-hugging jeans; and the rest of us showed up in whatever we thought looked smart and sexy or comfortable to dance in—in my case a saturated-blue long-sleeve button-down as soft as a cloud and my best boots and black jeans. I looked good, though that night it almost went without saying.

Everyone was pretty relaxed. The big multipurpose room at the sprawling campus rec center had been redecorated within an inch of its life over a span of several days, so that when the lights were down and the colored gels were lit it looked like a cross between a glamorous ‘30s art deco top-floor ballroom and one of those lavish, overdone proms you get in big-budget ‘90s teen romcoms. Something about it drew you in and mesmerized you from the moment the doors closed behind you. The mix of outfits and the carefree crowd made it feel like folks had come there from everywhere and everytime to laugh and kick up their heels and let the mood and music take them places they’d never been before.

The subtextual and pervasive presence of primo weed was probably a big part of the dream weaving around our feet along with the faint, low-curling wisps of dry ice adding gently to the atmosphere. There was a lot of pot on campus these days, more than when I’d left a year ago on my doctoral-program study abroad. There wasn’t much cannabis in the Vatican archives, either, so I was very conscious of that distinctive cannabis odor everywhere I went these days now that I was back—shindigs included.

I didn’t partake myself, not regularly anyway, mostly because I was a light touch and any amount of pot would work me over and get me incredibly stoned. Seriously, in a snap. One joint had the same effect on me as an all-night bender for anyone else with the biggest bag of top-drawer weed you can imagine.

That made me pretty leery of pot consumption, but I didn’t mind being around it and I had a kind of perverse thing for the smell. I remembered my grandma used to wax nostalgic about the lingering odor of her husbands’ various characteristic pipe tobaccos even when they weren’t in the room, and sometimes it was like that: the smell was nice to have around, for its own sake and not just for the low-level contact high you get sometimes just from being around the stuff. I definitely missed it when it wasn’t there as I sifted through the secret records of whatever the asshole priests of five hundred years ago thought was more important to commemorate than anything else on earth for a solid ten months of my life.

That night I was feeling pretty jazzed as I wove through the crowd, despite not having personally toked any of the spliffs visibly making the rounds. And it wasn’t just the pot boosting my id—it was the men. Somehow, and I didn’t know how to wrap my noggin around it exactly, but it suire seemed like everyone at school had gotten a few notches hotter in the year I was away.

Sure, there’d been plenty of more-than-attractive guys on the mostly-Italian research team I’d joined. If you look into it Italy is well known for having a slightly higher proportion of lanky, seven-foot, double-hung Buffs than the rest of the Mediterranean world, not that demographics researchers have been able to discover a reason why beyond pure chance; and, sure enough, my little band of sexy, olive-skinned manuscript-thumbers had their fair share of tall, dark, and extra-handsome sons of Caesar and Cesare. No Multis in the work posse, though I noticed as we crossed the plazas and cloisters every dawn and dusk that a good sixth of the colorfully uniformed Swiss Guard seemed to have been recruited for their extra limbs. Whether such a configuration was genuinely useful security-wise or a mere boon for tourists I had no idea. I made a mental note to do some reading on the subject when I got a chance.

I didn’t dip into the well of plentiful eye-candy in Rome, telling myself I was content merely to observe (and, okay, wank off at night in my room like clockwork). The others on the team weren’t all as circumspect as I was. One of my research buddies, a 6-foot-11 stubble-cheeked Sicilian Buff named Emilio, caught the roving eye of a smirky, blond-bearded Czech honor-guard lieutenant, and it was friggin’ adorable. By the end of my time there neither Emilio nor his now-infatuated officer-boytaur, Tomáš, was likely to be found at their respective posts, though there were plenty of sightings of the pair on Emilio’s increasingly steamy social media accounts.

Now, back in Colorado for the first time in ages, it seemed like the hotness factor everywhere I went had been progressively kicked up a notch or three, like Colorado Springs was a red zone on the global heat map of baseline gorgeous masculinity. Students, faculty, and townies were all broadly affected, though the undergraduate mass of attendees at UCCS had gotten a particularly potent boost. Not only were there more Buffs and Multis than ever, but even the regular male population was saturated with deliciously broad shoulders, sharp jawlines, bright eyes, and round, grabbable butts that sorely tempted your resolve—and this was everywhere. Grocery stores, lecture halls, Whataburger… everywhere I went I saw butts I longed to touch and, well, manually admire.

Imagine, then, sifting your way through a vast, confected ballroom teeming with lean, ripped, bedroom-eyed ultrahunks in their finest, most flattering clothes, and you have the recipe for a floating, huge-grin high even before you factored in all the sweet, potent pot redolence twining around our feet.

Ironically, after an hour of wandering the crowd and progressively sliding into my own slow, personal groove amidst all the gyrating and eye-fucking, it was that very chockablock cock-thickenening male perfection saturating the venue that ultimately drew me to the comparatively skinny, undersized, malt-shop-cute strawberry blond expertly fruging to some big-band ‘50s proto-surf music just left of center on the gel-spangled dance-floor. All around him moved sculpted thick-chested six-footers, four-armed hunks and double-torsoed Adonises, a whole swath of happy, cavorting Buffs barely hiding their twin monsters—basically an army of humpy, intoxicating enticement swirling around in every direction—and here was this guy, barely reaching my less-than-dizzying 5-foot-8, like me ungraced by the obvious swells and bulges of our generously muscled contemporaries, having the time of his life swaying confidently to the old, surefire beats in a white tuxedo jacket, midnight blue shirt, black slacks, and a sky-blue bow tie. A tiny bead of sweat or two dotted his temples, which to me suggested he was cutting a metaphorical rug for no other reason than that he enjoyed it and saw it as an end in itself.

I watched him for a while as we danced separately a little ways apart, wanting to make sure he wasn’t with some. Deciding he was probably unspoken-for, I slipped closer, casually entering his dance bubble, and tried matching his movements as best I could.

“Hi,” I said, generously offering him a free sample of my brilliant conversational skills.

He caught my eye and threw me a wide, dimply grin that was so friendly and welcoming, I felt a rush of warm, heady arousal shudder through me in response. I was already half-hard just from the sexy nature of the crowd, and that simple smile tripped me closer to three-quarters wanton and fully fixated on this sweet, sexy man.

“Hi,” he returned amiably, giving me a quick once-over. “You’re a good dancer,” he added, still with the ball-tugging smile.

I might have rolled my eyes at the fib if I hadn’t been so thoroughly insta-smitten. “Not as good as you,” I answered truthfully. The music wasn’t so loud we had to shout over it, but filled the space thoroughly enough that our conversation felt reasonably private. “I’m Woody, by the way,” I said.

He raised an amused eyebrow, the expected response in any but the most subtext-free environments, but refrained from remarks or downward glances by way of attempted confirmation of my supposed namesake. Just as well, as in this case there would indeed have been evidence of my being “woody” in that moment if he’d looked. Instead, he answered, “I’m Bart.”

I nodded, finally returning his smile. Odds were we had the “embarrassing old-fashioned multisyllable name with a not-much-improved nickname” thing in common. If I called him Bartholomew he’d probably tease me back and call me Woodrow, and in that moment a scenario like that seemed ridiculously romantic and intimate.

After we’d danced a little longer I offered to buy him a drink, and he agreeably suspended his sway and followed me to the drinks table. Retreating to a quiet corner, we talked over cocktails in plastic cups (mine a surprisingly strong screwdriver, his a seven and seven). Up close he was even cuter than I’d thought, with bright hazel eyes, clear faintly tanned skin, and a spray of almost invisible freckles across his upper cheeks you didn’t notice until you were in kissing distance.

Bart turned out to be a math whiz in his senior year of undergrad, and seemed duly impressed by my superior rank as a doctoral student. He slyly plied me for stories about various graduate advisors and all about the studies and shenanigans of my year in Rome. In return, he told me about his horny-slash-stoned fellow majors and their “mathlete” sense of humor, like the multis jokingly trying to enforce the use of multiple number systems besides base-10 out of “digital equity.” I laughed.

I gave the crowd a scan as we talked. The party was picking up steam, and the venue was near capacity. “I was just thinking this place seems to have gotten a hotness upgrade while I was gone,” I said, finishing my drink and tossing the cup in a nearby bin.

We looked out at the crowd together and Bart shrugged. “You probably just missed being here,” he observed. “Though,” he added, glancing up at me with a smile and a wink, “they do say Hashery boys are the hottest.”

I immediately recognized the name and what it signified. It’d been up to the pot superstore once or twice. “Present company included?” I guessed.

His smile went slightly more knowing. “You smoke? I missed the last big ‘tasting’ event, which was evidently a huge deal,” he observed, rolling his eyes in mockery of his excitable friends. “But I recently treated myself to some primo blend if you want to share. Pot doesn’t really get me high the way it does for most people, but I do like to watch,” he added with sly smile that was enough to pop one of those heartbreaking dimples of his.

For my part, I was already kind of high from the room and the company, and figured that this was a good night for one of my rare forays into cannabis indulgence. “Lead the way,” I said gamely. Pleased, Bart turned and headed for the nearest double doors into the mild late-summer night, with me close on his heels, as hard and horny as I had ever been.

The back of the rec center opened up on a large, shadowy wooded area that had been preserved as a rolling parkland and seeded through with all kinds of different trees for botany students to study and the rest of us to neck under. A few couples and trios had already wandered out from the festivities and were engaging in private conversations of varying levels of intimacy. Most folks were still inside having fun, and it wasn’t difficult for us to find a little secluded knoll behind some aspens where we could talk, the now-muted music and hubbub from the dance having followed us in congenial companionship, rippling through the grass and leaves at our feet.

As soon as we were alone, without further ceremony Bart retrieved a plastic baggie from an inner pocket and pulled out a long, thick joint, brandishing it between his fingers with glinting eyes and a crooked smile.

“Shit,” I said, staring at it. “That thing is going to fuck me over!”

Bart’s smile became a leer, making it clear that was exactly what he wanted to do to me, too. He didn’t waste any time on lewd jokes, though. Stowing the rest of his stash, he produced a clear orange lighter, put the joint between his lips, and lit it, drawing a long toke that I watched with avid fascination. I knew all the different smells pot could have, and as soon as the joint hit the air and I got a whiff I knew this was serious loco. After a few beats Bart breathed out, sending a long steam of smoke from his nostrils, and I actually had to suppress a moan.

“What is this shit?” I asked, taking the joint from him and breathing it in deep as far as it would go. I wanted to cry, it was so smooth. And yet the potency of it was intense enough could feel it powering through my cells and tissues like they were gossamer. My inner workings might as well have been a vat of clear water someone had dropped a whole pot of vivid red ink into. Diffusion was the nature of my existence and of part of me could resist.

“A lot’s changed while you were off playing medieval monk,” Bart teased, taking the joint back from me and holding it close to his lips, ready for his next pull. I almost giggled at his joke—fuck, I was already high as a kite being flown from the ISS—but I sternly reminded myself I had to keep the toke in, so I heroically held back. Bart eyed me with amusement, which is how I knew I was stoned—I can be stoic and mysterious, but when I’m high everything I’m thinking plays out on my face like Broadway musical. That made me want to laugh, too, but only the tiniest of snorts escaped.

“Anyway, as I understand it,” Bart said, “they got three product tiers at the Hashery now: the regular varieties, the premium stuff, and the ‘secret blends.’ That stuff is wild, or so I hear. I bet it would do you in. Expensive as shit, though.”

Fuck, it was staying in forever. Did I not have to breathe anymore? “And this?” I asked, in that special stoner croak that doesn’t actually require you to let go of any of those sweet, sweet fumes.

Bart was pulling in his second toke, but he held it in and managed to answer, “Premium. The middle stuff. Blend’s called ‘Flex.’”

I nodded. It was a good name. The right name. I felt strong. All that potency was flooding into my bones and my guts and my muscles. I let out the smoke finally, but it was still working me over, twisting my brain around and rearranging my innards. I mean, I’d let out the smoke, right? And yet, I felt it collecting in my pecs and my biceps and my cock and my thighs and my delts—even my abs, tightening and firming and… strengthening? Was that right? Biology class videos from years ago surfaced in my occluded brain, of cells swelling and dividing under a microscope, all in a hurry like it was a game show and they had to beat the clock.

On one level it all made perfect sense, like it was the most natural of natural things for me to be experiencing inside myself, but I also wasn’t sure what was spiraling imagination and what was solid, verifiable truth.

Evidence. I needed another toke to confirm, and lo! there was the joint being offered to me by my adorable new man. “Eureka! Yes!” I said, grinning as I took the joint back from him. I stared at it in awe for a good few seconds before I remembered it was burning and would actually go away. Keen to fend off this catastrophe I quickly stuffed it between my lips and took a long, long pull.

As I was sucking the smoke into my deepest, furthest crevices I noticed Bart watching me with great enjoyment, like I was a nude juggler or something. With sudden alarm I looked down, almost choking on my intake—no, I was still clothed. Whew. As I held in the smoke, though, I became acutely aware of said clothes, like I was tracking every square inch of fabric brushing against my skin. Thank god I wore that soft, buttery-feeling blue shirt. It was like heaven. I was feeling it more than I should have, though, right? It had been loose before, but now it seemed… friendlier?

I snorted again, handing the joint back to Bart. “Is my shirt groping me?” I squeaked, keeping the smoke down as much as I could.

Bart laughed. He seemed pretty unbuzzed, unlike me, and I thought that was really funny. “Is your shirt what?”

I waited until I let out my stream of smoke to answer. “My shirt,” I said. “It’s feeling up my pecs, and my arms, and, fuck, my cock!” I said, because my erection had started to feel really massive in the grip of too much fabric.

“That’s your pants, Woody,” Bart said reasonably, lips quirked enough to show that dimple I loved.

“Ha ha, right,” I said, still focusing on my shirt. I was patting it, trying to figure out where it was fucking up its job of just hanging off me, but everything felt wrong under my hands and I couldn’t make sense of it. “This is too weird,” I said, rapidly fumbling the buttons open and hauling the shirt off me as best I could. It took a minute to get the shirt trails free of my pants and the cuffs were all uncooperative so it was a bit of a struggle, but I finally got the shirt off and sort of flung it down at my feet.

Then I just stopped, staring stupidly down at myself. “Wha—?” I mumbled. “Whose body is this?”

“I hope it’s yours,” Bart said in a low, smitten voice. He was standing a little closer now, and was staring at me so intensely I swear I could feel the burn of his gaze across shoulders an inch or two broader than they should have been, firm starter pecs I didn’t recognize, sinewy upper arms noticeably thicker than I remembered, and a faint six-pack that had to be someone’s idea of a joke.

“Nope,” I answered, still staring down as I shook my head. The fact that I was supremely baffled struck me as incredibly unfair, seeing as it had happened exactly at the moment my brain wasn’t working owing to all the super-strong pot. As I gaped down at my body I realized the wide, purple head of my cock was nosing free of my waistband, a single drop of welling precum utterly seizing my entire attention. “Whoa,” I said. I wanted to taste it, and I looked up at Bart to see if he did, too. He did.

He handed me the joint. It wasn’t quite half gone, and already I felt like I’d smoked a whole bag. I took it and pulled another long toke, staring into his beautiful hazel eyes the whole time. I was attuning myself to him, synchronizing with every crenelation and thought-wave of my fated, chaotically gorgeous universe-partner, and when he started to smirk with the knowledge of my increasingly infinite lust for him I saw it before it even reached his lips.

“Hey!” I said, forgetting I was holding in the smoke and letting it out inelegantly all over his face. “Wipe that smirk off your pretty lips!”

He was really close. I was looking down into those eyes like there wasn’t anything else to see. I could still feel how my body was reveling in swirling, concentrating strength. I could sense Bart’s warm hands brushing across the swell of pecs and biceps I was only just discovering were a part of me. I was acutely aware of my self-important cock and how smug it was to have left the days of being constrained and hidden behind… but the giddy happiness of his eyes and smile was all I could really, truly take in.

“Or what?” Bart goaded, those eyes full of lust and mischief.

“Or I’ll call you Bartholomew,” I slurred triumphantly, my lips inches from his.

Bart grinned. “Try it, Woodrow,” he purred.

“Trying” those lips was exactly what I had been craving for as long as I could currently remember. Thus invited, I bent the rest of the way and pressed my mouth against his, followed quickly by the remainder of my heated, Bart-craving body.

A lot more happened that night, it seems, but my memories are a tad murky. As for what I discovered when I woke up the next morning naked, fuzzy-brained, and horny in an apartment I didn’t recognize, that’s a story for another time.

After the tasting I went the rest of the day in a kind of this-can’t-be-real daze. I felt disconnected from everything, my own alarm and dismay included. As the post-event rush on the secret blends settled into a steady flow as word of mouth filtered through the Hashery community, all I could think was that holding it back was up clearly there with painting dicks on the moon or popularizing shoving scorpions up your nose in the category of futile impossibilities. The appeal of something both powerful and clandestine and the whispered rumors avowing intensified sex appeal with a single toke made the stuff irresistible, the steep price deterring some but validating its unique selling points to others. Beyond a fervent “be careful with this stuff, it’s really strong” as I helped Bill process the tide—a warning generally met with a grin and a wink by the excited stoner bros clearing the shelves of the crazy-powerful, not-meant-for-public-sale weed—I felt helpless to stem the slow, relentless spread of a strain of cannabis blend that could literally change the world like the leaves were embedded with tiny, nano-sized chaos demons.

I mean, I’d been there. Hell, I was actually, for real, a frickin’ body-swapped clone. That wasn’t something that you saw every day in the world I (or, rather, the guy I’d been accidentally duped from) had been born into, not that I could prove it or even tell anyone. Sure, that world had been mundane to the point of banal by comparison with this one. I barely remembered it, and I wasn’t sanguine about going back, were that even possible. Standing there at the registers, though, fielding the lusty smiles and the occasional brash kisses of hunky customer after hunky customer, norms, Buffs, and Multis alike, fans, friendlies, and unknowns, I couldn’t help feeling like I was recklessly feeding raw instability into the machinery of existence with every vacuum-sealed pack of Eros Omicron and Ganymede Zeta I scanned.

I was out of it the whole night. Driving home, don’t remember it. Dinner, half there. By some fluke all seven of us were home and there at the table for dinner, always a boisterous occasion, and me being checked out amused the rest of them.

“You with us, bro?” Kevin #2 said with a grin, nudging me with the big bowl of seasoned ground beef he was trying to pass me.

“Huh?” I blinked at him. “Uh, yeah, sure.” Trying to seem normal, I took the bowl on auto-pilot and spooned a pile of beef onto my empty plate.

The table erupted in astonished chuckles. “Du-ude,” one of the Kevins said, his blue eyes alight with laughter, and the word spread around the table like the cawing of seagulls. “Dude.” “Dude.” “Dude.” “Dude.”

Daddy Cliff and Daddy Lucas were amused, too. Lucas had a crooked grin, the elvin sylph as usual presenting as knowing a bit more than you expected, but only in the most fatherly, I’ve-got-your-six kind of way. Cliff, however, was guffawing. “Son, you okay?” he asked, his hirsute, brawny benevolence not putting him past a bit of friendly taunting of his own offspring.

I blinked, finally focusing on the big stack of yellow in front of me, which turned out to be taco shells. Chagrinned, I joined in the Henry-teasing. “Uh, it’s called taco scooping, losers,” I temporized with faux confidence. “All the rage on PicThread.”

“Of course,” one of the Kevins said, sharing a smirk with the Kevin next to him.

They were all watching me, so, finding myself thus under the gun, I gamely grabbed a shell to demonstrate. “See, instead of spooning it in you just… um… plow the stuff right into the shell.” I was having a little trouble with my made-up taco trend, the shell wanting to push the meat around instead of swallowing it willingly. Ignoring the titters, I used a fork in the other hand as a pusher and made it work. I looked up, smugly returning the others’ snarky grins. “And… result! Makes your taco extra messy,” I added, holding the beef-smeared shell up triumphantly like the smear of savory beef juice all over the shell was the whole point.

The others cheered, clearly approving of my lame but entertaining save. “You do that with the cheese, too?” Kevin #4 joked, nodding at the big ceramic bowl of shredded sharp cheddar like he was eager to join the bandwagon. “Lettuce and onions? Salsa?”

“However you want,” I said with magnanimity.

“Let’s all try it!” Kevin #2 said around a mouthful of (properly constructed) taco, reaching for the beef with his free hand. Several tanned and nicely corded Kevin-arms stretched out to join it—my identical brothers were always ready to launch into any game or pastime that would let them either compete with each other, make fun of me, or, in this case, both.

“Don’t make a mess,” Cliff warned his sons fondly, pointedly grabbing a shell and making a new taco for himself according to the established ritual.

Kevin #2 winked at me. “Dad doesn’t want us to make a mess,” he said. The way he said it caused an automatic surge of arousal in my gut, as he’d known it would. My balls, always churning, seemed to heat up, and my cheeks warmed in autonomic response.

“At the dinner table,” Lucas amended, still with that very aware half-smile.

Kevin #1 joined in, winking at me even more dramatically. “Dad doesn’t want us to make a mess… at the dinner table,” he smarmed.

I knew very well, from both recent experience and my half-strength fake memories of growing up in this reality, that the only way to deal with the Kevins was to meet them toe to toe and cock to cock. “Dude,” I told him, stonefaced, my tone flat and unemotive, “do not make me jizz on the tacos.”

The Kevins snorted as they busied themselves making and eating the delicious Tex-Mex treats the usual way, and random chatter resumed.

Normal service having resumed, I went ahead and started doctoring my sauce-smeared trendy newfangled “shovel taco” with cheese, salsa, chopped tomatoes, and shredded green-leaf lettuce, asking for what I needed if it was out of reach, just like we all were. As I worked I found myself glancing around the table, at the Kevins, at Cliff, at Lucas, at the obvious connections between us and with the home that warmed and sheltered us, the echoes of a childhood and adolescence I had almost-real memories of having, and my heart squeezed a little. I really did share in the love this family felt for each other, carnal undertow and all, and it hit me kind of hard that, however weird it was, I didn’t want to see this reality be swallowed up and gone like its predecessors had been, never to be seen or known again.

Next morning I was restless and agitated. The sunlight streaming through the open window was still red with dawn as I pulled myself out of the tangle of limbs created by the long-limbed, snuggling forms of two of my extremely amorous identical brothers, my anus and insides still thrumming appreciatively from a night’s worth rhythmic ministrations courtesy of K2’s endless, twisty cocks. Pausing a moment, I watched as K1 and K2 mumbled their protests before coming together under the covers like magnets, sidling close and curling their muscular arms around each other, cocks mindlessly jousting and lips mashing together in adorable grumbly sleep-smooches as they resumed their morpheic torpor.

Shaking my head, I turned and stumbled over cast-aside clothes and shoes to the en-suite. There I went through the regular morning routine of wetting a towel and efficiently wiping a shed-load of very aromatic cum off my chest, face, back, and abs, remembering heatedly how every ounce of it had gotten there. Returning to the bedroom, I hamper-dumped the towel and found jeans and a random pair of high-tops. Pulling them on (we all wore the same size), I gathered my keys, wallet, and phone, and got the heck out of there.

Flitting through the still-darkened house and into the chilly garage, I found my new truck, climbed in, and just drove. I had no place to be and no plans past an afternoon barbecue my dads had tentatively planned with the cousins and some of the Hashery crew they’d befriended at the birthday party. For now, I could just roll.

I needed to be doing something. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I was looking for. Ideas. Inspiration. The proliferation of the secret blends was something only I saw as a problem, but short of stealing every pack from the store, the warehouse, and a hundred customers’ homes and burning them in a giant bonfire I didn’t know what my next steps could possibly be.

Actually, I thought wryly as I sat at a stoplight, the scarlet-tinged sun clearing the trees to my right and bathing the mountains in a warm glow, burning all the secret blend in a big fire and producing a wall of super-powered pot haze might be a path to avoid.

The light turned, and I started driving again, the four-lane city thoroughfare mostly empty at this hour. I remembered suddenly that I wasn’t alone in my concerns. Amir saw it, too, but the unbearably handsome, thick-muscled, double-torsoed grump seemed as stumped as I was. More, he seemed resigned to what was happening, like there was no point in getting worked up over the impending radicalization of the local anatomy.

I wished I knew Amir better, but Thad’s memories of working with Amir pre-Mike Party were distant and, thanks to my identity-ancestor’s research-obsessed and insular nature back then, mostly unhelpful. Was this Amir’s surrender to events the wisdom of someone who knew it would all work out somehow, or was it resignation in the face of futility?

After a while I found myself at Woody Park, so I pulled into the lot and turned off the engine. Maybe a bit of greenery—of the non-cannabis variety—would help clear my head.

I got out and started wandering the expanse of grass and trees. Woody Park, the largest city park in Colorado, was rolling and naturally arboreal, as the name implied; though my implanted memories told me that in this reality my fellow high-schoolers and I used to joke that it was secretly named after Woodrow Dee, the first Buff mayor of Colorado Springs and therefore the first elected official in that state to sport an undeniable, impossible-to-avoid sternum-tapping permaboner (two, in fact), his rather unconventional career having fascinated our teenaged, hormone-soaked brains.

The park was particularly known for its bike, jogging, and skate paths, and as I walked and the early bird exercisers started to emerge my low-key anxiety started to return. Maybe it was just that they formed a higher percentage of joggers and bike nuts around here, but I was seeing a lot of Buffs and Multis. Like, seven out of ten of the people jogging and whizzing past me were dramatically augmented in one way or the other. Was it spreading already, so soon after the tasting? Or was I just out of touch?

The standard-issue Buff body was looking so normal now. Seven feet tall with yummy muscles and raging ab-obscuring boners was the new black. The ubiquity of hormone-firing, long-bodied muscle, easy handsomeness, and fat, commanding, lickable hard-ons in every direction was overwhelming. More unusual configurations were out there as well—but unusual configurations were kind of normal, too. One pair of lean, shorts-clad joggers loping easily past me made me look twice—they were both double-torsoed and classically muscled, their sweaty upper bodies were painted with trails of what looked like clear precum running down from cockhead-like nipples, and all four faces were exactly the same. Were they twins, or was the guy somehow double-torsoed and double-bodied?

A lot of the joggers and bikers waved and grinned as they passed, recognizing me as HashHunkHenry. Guiltily, I realized I should have been livestreaming my existential crisis this whole time. Bad influencer!

I got to a little picnic area, a few of the tables occupied by couples and threesomes, some dressed for exercising, others just out for a walk like me. A few were making out, but most were talking or sharing coffees and crullers from a nearby pastry truck. Several lifted a hand in greeting, recognizing the minor internet celebrity among them, but they were polite enough to leave me be as I strolled alone through the little clearing.

To distract myself I started looking over a noticeboard standing toward one end of the area. One colorful flyer gave me pause. “EROS PARTY!” It announced in handdrawn letters, the attention-getting banner accompanied by a lovingly detailed version of the Greek god as a CILF (Cherubim I’d Like to Fuck), with a cunning face, deliciously delineated muscles worthy of a gymnast moonlighting as a superhero vigilante, and a single veiny cock so big it shoved straight past his full, kissable lips, bending very slightly in the middle as if to make you wonder just what that would feel like inside you. Two fists gripped the bow just below the arrowhead, while two sets of hands pulled back the bowstring, the angle of the shot seeming to be aimed directly at the viewer. Which, in this case, was me.

I might have let myself get sidetracked by the idea that love was what I was missing—maybe that was why the Bill-infatuated Amir was shrugging off the body apocalypse, after all—but I was too caught up in the text beside the smokin’ hot bow-wielding deity. The posters of the flyer had, it seemed, bought or come into a considerable supply of Eros Omicron, one of the most potent of the secret blends, and were hoping to get as many people to share the high as possible. The event was to be here, in this part of the park, and was scheduled for the following night at sundown.

I stared at the goldenrod flyer. Looking around, I noted a few more on the message board and elsewhere around the picnic area. A crowd of people sharing a full-on, transporting Eros Omicron high, sharing more and more of the pot around until they were fully linked and utterly stoned? Fuck, every single one of them was going to be radically transformed. Forget the assembly of hash-zonked giants I’d seen at Mike’s. That was just a dozen or so guys. A whole mob of dudes wasted on secret blend pot? There would be transformations I couldn’t even imagine. Mutations that might be malleable… communicable…

“Hey bro, can I get a selfie?” a friendly voice said.

I blinked and realized there was a cute guy standing next to me. He was sandy blond, maybe six-foot-six, so a little shorter than me. He was not a Buff, but had come jogging shirtless, showing off ten-pack abs and a trio of flat, wrist-wide erections pushing cheekily past the elastic waistband of his black running shorts. He was beaming at me, phone in hand, obviously a fan and a little self-conscious of having interrupted me.

I turned on my fan smile. “Absolutely,” I said, then nodded at his fat, very tempting hard-ons. “Are those for me?” I joked, because he didn’t seemed to be the perma-boner sort the way most Buffs were.

His eyes twinkled, thrilled at being engaged with. “Oh, man, you have no idea,” he answered, grinning. He lifted up his phone, and I dutifully put my arm around his well-muscled shoulders, instantly feeling the quiver of pleasure he got from my touch. We smiled for the selfie, and I let a bit of tongue show for the second one, just for extra titillation.

“Thanks,” he said gratefully, turning to me, and before I knew it he’d pushed up on his toes and stolen a brief but memorable kiss. His tongue was surprisingly… firm? … and I had to pull myself back from forgetting everything and falling deep into that kiss. He gave my cocks a quick palm-stroke and then he was off with a grin and a wave, heading toward the group of friends who’d been watching supportively from a distance.

Well, that was nice, I thought. What was I worried about again?

My phone buzzed, reminding me again how bad I was being at my ostensible job. I pulled it out and saw a notification from my hairy, muscly, wet dream of a dad.

Cliff: NEED SAUSAGE

My lips quirked. Do you, now?

A beat, then it buzzed in my hand again and another notification appeared.

Cliff: FOR THE BARBECUE, GOOFBALL

I snorted and opened the messaging app, replying that I would bring him all the big, thick sausage he could handle. He replied with a rolled-eyes emoji that was a lot funnier than anything sexual he might have texted back.

Phone still in hand, I glanced at the flyer again, considering my hot dads, my hot brothers, the hot fan I’d just encountered. Okay, maybe a transformed world might not be a calamity. Still, if there was someone at the “Eros Party” with that weird, fluky world-changing gene, all bets were definitely off. That combination of events could change everything—literally.

Wait, I thought, my pulse jumping. That was it.

I was still gripping my phone. Quickly, I pulled up the video call app and dialed K3.

His smiling face appeared on the screen within seconds, pushing aside a fistful of long, beautiful platinum blond hair, and immediately my cocks surged at how amazingly attractive he was. My mouth ached to kiss him, but I kept myself on task. “Dude,” I said. “Do you remember who you were? Before the birthday party?”

He smiled wider in confusion. “Whut?” he said. I had to laugh—the sun was barely up and he was already baked. Typical Kevins.

“Focus, bro,” I said. I leaned toward the screen. He watched me, his bright blue eyes wide and blown. “Lex,” I said. “Aleksei. Do you remember being Aleksei?”

K3 was very, very high. After a few wild nights with the secret blend stuff the Kevins had been “rediscovering” the so-called regular-strength stuff the Hashery sold. We could afford the premium and secret lines easily enough—this reality’s version of Daddy Cliff cleaned up in commissions as the senior VP at the Lexus megastore, and I was pretty sure Lucas had a magic pot of gold quietly secreted away somewhere—but the Kevins, very rationally, didn’t want the special varieties to lose their specialness and become mundane through overuse. Consequently they’d been stoning themselves out of their gourds on their favorite regular blends, which for a theoretically entry-level offering still pack a serious wallop.

I was pretty sure I could even tell which one, based on how deep in my goofy brother was. Namewise the secret blends were god-coded (Herakles Lambda, Apollo Epsilon, Ganymede Zeta) and the premium blends got gymbro-themed monikers (Flex, Push, Sweat); the regular-strength packs, by contrast, got called things like Antonio (a short, intense smoke with hints of perfectly marinated steak rubbed with sage) and Zeke (which always reminded me of the slow earthiness of a deep forest, for some reason). My guess was K3 was baked on János, which had a welcoming, all-compassing high with soft swirling colors like a rave and a faint edge of paprika. János always got us super blissed-out and a bit loopy. I’d made some very popular livestreams while I was high on János with my buddies and bros.

K3 had already forgotten my question. He pushed another hank of slithery white-blond hair out of his face and grinned at me. “Dude, you are so cute today. Come smoke with us!”

Sighing, I moved to the nearest park bench and sat, enjoying the slide of my messy cockheads up my sternum as I settled on the seat. Somebody let out a “woof” of appreciation—here were figures lingering on my peripheral vision, watching me. It was pretty standard anytime I was using my phone, people wondering if I was filming or livestreaming and hanging out to watch, phones out, being a part of my world for a few transient seconds. I didn’t look up, but I kept a light smile on my face, reminded I was in public and had an audience however unsettled and uncertain I was feeling inside.

K3 wasn’t alone, apparently, which might affect what I wanted to talk about. “Who you with, bro?” I frowned, realizing I didn’t recognize the background. It was still early, but wherever he was it wasn’t the house. “Where are you, anyway?”

Kevin beaned at me as if the most amazing thing in Earth’s history had happened to him. “Dude! Amir-Man and the Billtaur invited me for a sleepover! Look!” He tilted the phone around dizzyingly, showing off Amir’s spacious, rustic-themed cabin up behind the Hashery that our much-loved four-legged Kansas transplant had happily moved into not long ago. The one-second tour included a blurry pan across Amir and Bill in bed behind him, and when he re-aimed the camera at himself he angled the shot so the two men were visible behind him.

Bill paused in his stroking of Amir’s massive, hairy front chest and waved a cheery six-fingered hello at me. I waved back. Amir was leaning back against himself and smoking a fat joint that was already half gone, but he didn’t look stoned so much as very, very calm. He was staring straight ahead as if he might be able to somehow impinge his fathomless pot-serenity onto the chaotic world around him, which seemed very Amir to me. Even his tranquility was intense and a little ferocious. A couple of his meaty hands were wrapped around his lover’s back, the tawny hands claiming the pale flank in two separate places.

Wait—since when did Bill have extra fingers? Was he like that when he turned boytaur? Whatever. It was getting so I couldn’t keep track of all of it.

Three was still gushing. “Dude!” he stage-whispered as though imparting a secret. Like his randy bedmates couldn’t hear him if he lowered his voice and spoke a little breathier but just as loud. “Amir can mirror-kiss! I saw it! He’s a mirror-kisser!”

I shook my head, amused at how awed he was. I’d heard rumors, but then people said it about me, too, and a lot of other really hot guys. Making out with mirror-self when you were really high seemed natural, and for some guys it was a real thing that actually happened. Amir, though, was so compellingly handsome—twice over, the two-torsoed bastard—that he was almost impossible to resist, and I could totally buy that his own reflections wanted in if he was baked enough.

“So can you, bro,” I reminded Kevin teasingly. Bill snickered, and even Amir’s lips twitched.

“Oh yeah,” he said, giggling. “I never bother though, ‘cause I already got three other Kevin-mes to kiss!”

“You look worried, Hank,” Bill said to me.

I let out a breath and figured I should level with him, at least partway. “I know you don’t agree, B, but I’m absolutely certain the secret blends are just too powerful to be sold to the general public,” I said. When he didn’t object I continued hurriedly, “They’re changing people, Bill, and it’s going to keep spreading.” I flailed for something that would make him as alarmed as I was. “Maybe the military will get hold of it,” I said. “Or some kajillion-dollar company will take it away from us and make pervert it to their own ends. It’s already spreading so fast.”

Bill bit his lip. “It is a huge seller,” he said, as though the downside of that might be becoming as clear as the upside for the Hashery, even if he didn’t know a tenth of what it was capable of if accidentally it met up with more people like me who possessed the reality-shift gene and Lex’s innate access to the primordial reservoir of raw galactic power. None of them would even know they were altering the fabric of the universe as they did it.

Amir released a long, straight plume of pot smoke. “What were you saying about Aleksei?” he asked calmly, still staring ahead and not turning toward camera.

I eyed Amir for a second, my stomach fluttering for some reason. Aleksei didn’t exist in this reality—he’d become Lex and then K3—so the name shouldn’t mean anything to the prickly Hashery master. “Oh, uh, just a friend of mine,” I said. “You don’t know him.”

Amir took another short toke, then passed the joint to Bill. He released again and said, “I used to know an Aleksei.” His tone was flat and languid, but when he turned his back head toward me, the one the others weren’t really watching, his gaze went through me like an arrow.

I stared back at him. Amir knew. I’d suspected he was more aware of everything than most of the people changing obliviously with the uncanny power of our eldritch metaweed, but my heart clenched as I understood: Amir probably knew as much as I did.

“I dreamed about him!” Kevin said, eyes wide. He was very stoned. “He was hot. Or I was. Maybe both! And—” He giggled again, focusing on me suddenly in his glee. “You had doggie ears, bro!”

Well, that answered my question about whether he remembered being Lex. The answer was a resounding “sort of.” Before I could ask him anything, he added. “And then everything changed cuz we went through some tubes, and then we were here!”

“Tubes,” I repeated. I made eye contact with the Amir-face that was watching me, letting him hold my gaze. This part was coming back to me.

“Tuuubes,” Kevin said, nodding. “Totally. Henry-dude was talking about tubes. Not you-Henry, tube-Henry.” He snickered at the rhyme. “Tubes between realities or something.”

“Sounds like a weird dream,” Bill said distractedly as he slowly traced the curves of Amir’s massive chests with fingers and palms.

“It’s a little more than that,” Amir said, and Bill glanced up at him in surprise.

“Tubes connecting realities,” I said, talking it out. “Because the reality shifts aren’t reshaping reality, they’re like—like changing shirts. The original, the one you’re trying to fix, still exists, still messed up.” I knew all this, I realized, but I was still disheartened. This world was going to get out of control with the power of the secret blends spreading exponentially, and all a reality shift would do is ensure it still happened to the other seven billion people on this particular version of Earth. That left a very bad taste in my mouth, not least because as a sort-of Thad-descendant I felt like I had more responsibility for this transformation tumultus than anyone else I could think of.

Bill snorted. “You don’t even wear shirts,” he said, tossing me a smirk. “You’d have to borrow one just to change it.”

Bill’s offhand words hit me like a thunderclap. I gaped at Amir, and both faces were staring back at me. He sat up a little. “We can borrow one,” Amir said.

“Instead of going through the tubes—” I said, excited.

“—We can bring him through the tubes to us,” he finished.

Kevin had lost the thread. “Whut?” he said, baffled. “Who?”

Amir and I were grinning. “Thad Loukanis,” we said together.

To Kevin I added, “We’re going to get everyone together in a circle and use the super-pot to bring a Thad from another reality here to us.”

“Why?” Bill asked, perplexed.

“The distinct genetic structure of the secret blends,” Amir said. “It’s kind of like code. I don’t understand it, I can only cultivate it. Thad, though…”

“He’s the master coder,” I said.

“And we’re going to bring Thad to us? From another reality? Through the ‘tubes’?” Bill said, sounding more skeptical than confused.

“Like a séance!” K3 said, excited. He looked at me. “Like a big pot séance, right?”

I grinned at my hot bro, feeling a sudden rush of love for his stoned ass. “Exactly like,” I agreed. “We’re going to have a big supercannabis séance and bring us home a Thad.”

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