Morning Complications

Evan was awake before his alarm, which hadn't been difficult considering that he hadn't slept a wink.

Just as he had all night, he tried to relax, to let go of his stress, his worry, all brought on by a mistake that he feared would follow him for the rest of his life. But it was useless, just as it had been for hours. Every time his mind started to calm down, his memories rose up, fresh again, punishing him with a wave of recollection.

Madame Ruth.

The potion.

His stepmother.

His dad asking permission to use the car.

He groaned softly and rolled onto his back, scrubbing his hands over his face. The digital clock on the nightstand read 6:00 a.m. in bright, unforgiving numbers. Not once had he been successful in finding sleep that night. Not one hour. Not one minute.

He had tried. God, he had tried.

Every time he drifted close to sleep, exhaustion crashing over him in a tidal heaviness, it had happened again. A sudden, vivid image of Stacy would slam into his mind without warning. Sometimes she was laughing. Sometimes she was leaning across the kitchen counter. Sometimes she was just looking at him with that sharp, unimpressed stare that made him feel twelve years old and deeply inconvenient.

And every single time, his body reacted instantly. Not with his usual annoyance, frustration, or even anger at her being part of his life. But with arousal. Intense, sudden, urgent arousal. Lying in the dark, an image of Stacy in his imagination, and an aching erection in his boxers.

He squeezed his eyes shut at the memory of it. The jolting wakefulness. The humiliating intensity of it. The way it had taken forever to fade, leaving him exhausted and angry and deeply, deeply confused.

Then, just as he started drifting off again, it would happen all over.

By four in the morning he had given up on sleep entirely and just lay there, staring into the dark and silently hating his life.

A few times he had considered taking care of his arousal himself, slip his hand into his underwear, find relief in a way he'd found many times before. The idea, though, felt wrong. Yes, he'd accidentally changed the universe to make Stacy his wife, but pulling one off while holding an image of her in his mind felt like a further violation. Maybe it was the guilt of already taking so much from her, or maybe it was because he was mad at her for how terrible she'd been to him despite the fact that he hadn't meant for any of this to happen, but Evan had rejected the idea. Besides, touching himself while thinking of her seemed to be exactly what the potion's magic wanted him to do, and he had to find a way to resist.

The worst thing you can do is fight it.

Madame Ruth's words came back to him as daylight began to seep weakly through the spare room curtains, painting thin stripes across the carpet. Of course he was going to fight it! Stacy wasn't the only one losing something in this magical mishap. Evan was young, his whole life ahead of him, a whole world to explore. Now, suddenly at nineteen, he was married to a twenty-seven-year-old woman. A bombshell of a woman, yes, but he was too young to be tied down. He wanted to live his life, not be a married man at his age.

Especially if that woman he had to be married to hated his guts.

He pushed himself upright, sitting on the edge of the bed. This was not how any part of his life had been supposed to go.

He had bought the potion for a girl at school. A girl who probably didn't even know his name. A girl who, at worst, might have rejected him awkwardly and allowed him to spiral privately like a normal person. Evan hadn't even been thinking of what the consequences of his purchase might have been. He'd just been looking for a shortcut, a bypass around his anxiety, straight to the woman's heart. Maybe it would turn into a school fling, a hot girlfriend to teach him how it felt to be loved.

But not this.

Not marriage.

Not Stacy.

And with Madame Ruth cheerfully announcing that the effects were permanent, the future stretched in front of him like a hallway with no exits and increasingly terrible wallpaper.

He reached blindly for his phone on the nightstand, hoping distraction might dull the edge of his thoughts. Doomscrolling had always been reliable for numbing existential dread. He unlocked the screen and automatically opened his messages.

A couple of his friends had sent overnight memes. One involved a raccoon stealing a slice of pizza. Another was a heavily captioned screenshot from a video game he didn't even play anymore. He stared at them without really seeing them.

Then he noticed a thread that absolutely had not been there yesterday.

Stacy.

His stomach dropped.

His thumb hovered for a moment before he tapped it open.

The conversation scrolled upward. And upward. And upward. Months of messages. More than a year's worth, judging by the timestamps. Messages he had never sent. Messages he had never received. It felt like reading someone else's private life. Like breaking into a diary that had somehow been written in his own handwriting.

Stacy's texts were warm. Encouraging. Playful in a way he had never heard from her before. She asked how his classes were going. She reminded him about appointments. She sent little updates about her day like they were sharing a running conversation that never really stopped.

His own replies, the replies that apparently existed now, were attentive. Soft. Proud. He complimented her constantly. Told her she was beautiful. Told her he was lucky. Told her he missed her when she was out running errands for an hour.

It was nauseating.

And strangely intimate.

The Stacy and Evan who existed in this world, the ones he and his stepmother were supposed to be, seemed happy. Loving. In every metric he could imagine, a good and healthy couple. Unable to quell his curiosity, he scrolled further, his pulse picking up despite himself.

The tone shifted in places. The messages grew flirtier. Suggestive in a way that made his ears burn even though he was completely alone in the room. Stacy, in this rewritten universe, clearly liked sending selfies.

Some were harmless. Pictures of her in store mirrors holding shopping bags. Pictures of dinner plating experiments. Once, a photo of her making a ridiculous face while covered in flour.

Then there were the others.

Outfits that seemed selected for effect. Lingerie that left very little to the imagination. Playful poses. Costumes that looked like they had no practical purpose whatsoever.

And then a few photos that suggested she had simply stopped worrying about clothing entirely.

It was when he came across the picture of Stacy, buck naked, sitting on the kitchen counter with a finger clearly inserted into her vagina that Evan made a strangled noise and slammed the phone face-down onto the mattress like it might explode. Heat surged through him, sudden and overwhelming, dragging him right back into the miserable cycle that had dominated his entire night.

"I do not need this," he muttered hoarsely.

He stared at the ceiling again, breathing slowly, willing his body to calm down. Willing his erection to calm down.

But a worse realisation settled into his chest like a lead weight: This was his life now.

"Damnit," he said, louder this time, tossing the phone further across the bed like distance might make the entire situation less real.

He swung his legs over the side of the mattress and sat there in nothing but his boxers, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. The fabric tented conspicuously in front of him.

He closed his eyes.

Of course it did.

He needed to get ready for school. The thought hit him like a fresh wave of exhaustion. Classes. People. Normal conversations while he was running on zero sleep and existential catastrophe.

He was going to need so much coffee.

Unfortunately, he was also going to need time. There was absolutely no way he could walk into the hallway like this. His dad could not see him like this. Worse, Stacy could not see him like this.

His brain betrayed him immediately by wondering if she had slept any better than he had. He imagined her sprawled comfortably across the master bed, enjoying the space, completely unaffected by magical harassment.

A bitter thought slid in right behind it.

She was probably thrilled to have the bed to herself. If he admitted he was exhausted, she would probably laugh. Tell him he deserved it. Tell him the universe was simply delivering a very creative punishment for ruining her life. Which, technically, he guessed, wasn't entirely unfair.

He scrubbed a hand through his hair and stared down at himself with deep resentment.

"This is ridiculous," he muttered.

The room remained unhelpfully silent.

Climbing to his feet, Evan began to pace. It was a waiting game for his erection to go down. He tried counting slow breaths. Tried very hard not to think about anything at all, in fact, which unfortunately guaranteed that his brain kept circling back to every possible memory, image, and implication connected to the woman currently occupying the master bedroom.

Minutes crawled by.

He remained standing in the middle of the spare room in his boxers, very aware of the situation in his underwear, again considering just taking care of it himself, using his hand. Maybe then he'd be able to get on with his day, perhaps find a way to stay awake for his time at school.

He stared at the door.

He stared at the floor.

He wondered, with growing dread, how he was supposed to survive the next twelve hours, let alone the rest of his life.