Epilogue: No Loose Ends

Things at home went about as well as Aaron hoped they would.

Allie was little more than a puppet for the first few days, and a lie to her family about meeting someone and running away on holiday together had to be concocted via text. The worried voicemails stopped when she also sent some selfies with Aaron from the beach and other nearby couples locations. With both Aaron and Natalie coaching her, she eventually regained her sense of will, but never shook off her unquestioning loyalty to both of them, allowing she and Aaron to remain a couple in the long-term.

The new Natalie completely turned her life around, finding a job in marketing and some unassuming guy who she eventually bullied into proposing to her. He was sweet, but dull and unimaginative - the exact kind of person that the old Natalie would have openly mocked. The new Natalie still made fun of him, but only in the privacy of Aaron and Allie's bed. She was eight weeks pregnant with her third child now, but Aaron was fairly confident that at least this one wasn't his.

Neither of Aaron's parents suspected a thing, being drunk when they weren't entirely absent. Emily may have caught on that something was amiss if she hadn't discovered a natural talent for athletics, and was now boarding at a state university on a sports scholarship program. Aaron hoped that karmically, that one balanced out.

Things went very poorly for Sasha. What began as a confrontation between sugar daddies on her doorstep escalated into a violent brawl: Her apartment was completely trashed, several people were arrested and her various income streams dried up quickly as word got out. Aaron heard she had needed to move back in with her parents, only avoiding being disowned because of the debilitating "PTSD" she had been diagnosed with after that night. Even after she recovered mentally, she was stuck under her parent's legal conservatorship, which they were not about to rescind any time soon.

The multitool had been thrown away. He had actually tried to destroy it, but nothing he tried could manage so much as a scratch or dent. Instead, he wrapped it up in a mass of lead sinkers, plastic bags, cable ties and duct tape before dropping it into the plunge pool of a waterfall by a remote walking track. It wouldn't stay there forever, but hopefully long enough to not become a problem in his lifetime.

It took less than half a week for Aaron to fully recover his sense of self, no longer feeling his soul threaten to shake loose when he reached orgasm. He still felt a pang of loss when he felt the phantom memory of inhabiting a woman's body, and there was always an undercurrent of jealousy when either Natalie or Allie shuddered to climax in his arms. Getting pregnant had never been on his to-do list, but Natalie had gained an almost obsessive fascination with having another life growing inside her, stroking herself to orgasm with one hand while fondling her growing stomach with the other. Allie had followed his instructions to remain on contraception, but has also developed an erotic obsession with the life growing in Natalie's womb.

It made Aaron wonder what he was missing out on.