Many months later

To cut a long story short:

Rarely do you spend more than a day inside a single girl or woman. Often, you possess multiple hosts in the course of a day. At first, you spend all your time in them alone; only when that begins to pall do you begin venturing out to see what male company is like. It's distasteful at first, and you never really acquire a liking for it. (Often you wind up taking your hosts for a spin with another woman rather than a man.) But you soon learn how to relax and let your host's body respond to a man's attentions, and just lie back and enjoy the thrills second-hand.

You never grow jaded, but you do acquire a little more distance on your situation, and on what it is like to be inside a woman. It irritates you to find that so many of your gender really don't know how to handle them—not the way you think you could handle them now, with your experience, if you were in their place. And when you do find a man who can set your temporary abode vibrating, it embarrasses you to see how well they can get your host going.

Often you don't even stick around for the main event: it is usually enough to go into a woman and spend hours admiring your new body as you bathe and primp and prepare for a night out. The shaving and the plucking; the caress of makeup against a soft and beautiful face; the combing and tousling of hair; the brush of soft but tight clothing against a firm and well-shaped body. Then there is the chase: the flirting and the teasing as you dangle your host before the hungry men. It feels good to be a woman, and to be sexy, and to be desired. But then you will slip out as the clothes are coming off, to silently and invisibly watch. Once you're out, the women almost never understand how they got to where you've put them, which makes for some enjoyably mortifying moments. And then you're away, looking for someone new to possess.

And now you are in Paris. You found her—the lovely twenty-five-year-old blonde girlfriend of an ambitious American financial speculator—in the Louvre, admiring masterpieces of portraiture while waiting impatiently for her lover to get off his cell phone. You slipped into her from behind—being careful not to cause a ruckus—and then picked a fight with him and stormed off. Her credit card was good for some shopping—you had fun trying on new fashions at a couture shop—and lunch in a café.

You had no plans for her, beyond taking her for an afternoon spin. But in the café you saw the man admiring you. He was tall and thin and middle-aged, not the sort you (or your host) would typically give a second glance to. But he had a manner that suggested he would be more attentive than most. So, more as a lark than anything else, you let him talk you into going back to his hotel room, where he had champagne and a little fruit and cheese and light bread sent up, and the two of you chatted amiably on his balcony for nearly thirty minutes before he led you back inside. He gently lifted off your blouse, kissing your shoulders lightly as he did so, and pressed you softly back onto the bed and removed your sandals. He himself removed only his jacket and shoes and tie before leaning over to kiss you all over. And then, as you were beginning to sigh pleasurably and to think that there really was something nice in the idea of light, seductive petting that could last for hours, he suggested an aperitif. "Mmm," you said lazily, not really paying attention.

He smiled, and lifted the stopper from a small bottle on the night stand, and let a few drops fall into a glass that was hardly bigger than a thimble. "It has a kick to it," he said. "Don't let it throw you."

It smelled strong but fruity, like apricots, and it burned as it slid down your throat. In fact, it set you to coughing.

And the coughing didn't stop. It got much, much worse.

It set you coughing so hard that you doubled over and felt yourself—your real self, not your temporary body—fall with a heavy thud onto the floor. In a daze, you looked up to see the girl you'd been riding slumped, half-naked out of the bed, while your date stood nonchalantly looking at you both.