Stacy's Choice

The word together kept echoing in Stacy's head as she looked around the pink closet.

Together.

It was supposed to be reassuring. They'd both said it like a promise, like the two of them could somehow stand side by side against everything that had happened to them. Instead, standing in a closet full of pink walls, slutty clothes, towering shoes, and enough sex toys to make Stacy wonder what sort of woman the magic thought she was, the word sounded almost mocking.

Together.

Great. Just great.

Behind her, Evan remained in the bedroom doorway. Stacy could feel his presence without looking. He was probably watching her try to make sense of a space that had clearly been designed for someone far more playful than she had ever been. Someone younger, perhaps. Someone with fewer reservations and a considerably more adventurous relationship with her wardrobe.

The clothes alone were bad enough.

The growing itch inside her was worse.

Every time Stacy reached toward something, an almost physical urge followed. Touch it. Pick it up. See how it felt. Try it on. Explore. The curiosity was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and the longer she stood there, the more kinetic it seemed to become.

No.

Want was the wrong word. Stacy didn't want any of this. She was still Stacy. Same desires. Same fears. Same needs. Same woman who had spent years figuring out what she liked and, perhaps more importantly, what she didn't. A closet full of bizarre new clothes hadn't changed that.

Except something was definitely happening. The thoughts didn't feel like her own. They arrived without permission, bright and enthusiastic and completely unconcerned with her objections.

"Oh my god," one thought exclaimed. "That top is, like, totally bitchin'!"

Stacy stared at the garment.

Absolutely not.

Another thought immediately followed.

"I totally bet Evan would love to see me in that."

"No."

Then came an exaggerated little mental squeal as her eyes danced across the rows of dildos.

"Ooooooh. That black one is so big! I wonder if it would fit?"

"Damnit," Stacy muttered.

Hopefully Evan hadn't heard her. 0The last thing she needed was for him to come rushing into the closet with that miserable combination of pity and guilt he seemed to carry around with him, often leading to him clumsily trying to help, only making things worse. Her life was already a complete disaster. She didn't need to watch his face fall while he tried to apologize for something neither of them could fix.

Somehow, though, Stacy had to make this work. This was her future now, apparently. Hers and Evan's, courtesy of a magical mess neither of them had asked for and neither of them seemed capable of escaping. If she didn't figure out how to live with it, nobody else was going to do it for her.

"Would you mind giving me a minute?" she asked without turning around.

"Yeah," Evan said. "I'll be downstairs. I'll make coffee."

The footsteps retreated. A moment later, Stacy heard the bedroom door close. Silence settled over the room. Finally alone, she let her shoulders sag.

"Okay," she whispered.

The closet offered no advice.

Stacy could stay in her nightie. She could crawl back into bed, pull the covers over her head, and pretend the rest of the world didn't exist. For about five minutes, anyway.

Resistance hadn't worked before. The magic didn't seem to respond to refusal by politely backing off. If anything, fighting it only seemed to make things worse. Every attempt to hold onto the old reality had been answered with another impossible change.

So that was one option.

A terrible option, but an option.

The more realistic choice was playing along. Stacy's stomach tightened at the thought. Playing along didn't mean surrendering. It meant buying herself time. It meant figuring out what the magic wanted and finding a way to work within those rules instead of constantly smashing herself against them.

Most importantly, it meant spending time with Evan. They needed to connect somehow. Not as stepmother and stepson. Not as reluctant victims of some ridiculous potion. Not as the Master and the woman the magic had once turned into his property. As two people. People who might, somehow, learn to care about each other. A woman and her man.

Stacy reached toward a row of dresses, then stopped.

Her man.

The thought felt absurd. Evan wasn't anything like the men she'd normally been attracted to. Worse, there was all that history between them. She remembered the sniveling brat she'd been forced to deal with when she was married to Evan's father. Then came the potion, and everything that followed, including the humiliating period when the magic had reduced her to something she could barely recognize as herself.

How was she supposed to look at Evan and see a potential partner after all that? Yet hate wasn't going to free her. If anything, hate was exactly the sort of thing the magic could use against her. Stacy needed something else. Something she wasn't even sure she was capable of feeling.

Love.

The realization settled heavily in her mind. Somehow, she was going to have to love him. And maybe Evan was going to have to feel the same way about her.

"Damnit."

This time the word came out louder. The problem was no longer the closet.

Stacy reached for a garment, but her fingers brushed against something else first, something from another shelf. Her hand closed around its cylindrical length automatically. A moment later, she found herself slowly running her fingers along its surface while staring at the dresses.

Her mind immediately supplied an opinion.

"Pick the pink one!"

Stacy frowned.

"Your tits will look totally hot in it!"

"Shut up."

The thought didn't shut up. If anything, the imagined voice seemed delighted that she had answered. The pink minidress was attractive. Stacy hated admitting that. The cut was flattering, and she could already picture how it would look with the right shoes. More importantly, perhaps this could be a beginning.

If she was going to convince Evan that they needed to stop fighting their circumstances and start figuring out how to live with them, then she needed him to see her differently. Not as a problem. Not as someone he had to rescue. Not as the woman whose life he'd accidentally ruined. As a woman. Maybe that was where she should start.

Stacy thought about how many times, when she was younger, attraction had been the doorway to something deeper. Hormones could make people do ridiculous things, but they could also make people take risks they otherwise wouldn't have considered. Maybe the same principle could work here. Maybe attraction could become affection. Maybe affection could become something more.

Maybe.

She gave the object in her hand a distracted squeeze. The unfamiliar texture pressed against her fingers. Veined.

Stacy stopped.

Her eyes dropped.

For several seconds, she simply stared.

"Shit!"

The long black dildo landed on the carpet. Stacy stepped back from it as though it had personally betrayed her.

"Okay. New rule. Pay more attention to your hands."

Her face felt hot. That had been far too close to becoming one more thing the magic could use against her. Quickly, Stacy grabbed the pink minidress instead. A pair of platform heels sat nearby, practically begging to be included.

"Your legs will be so effing hot in those," the intrusive thoughts informed her.

"Yeah, yeah."

Dress. Shoes. Out. Stacy hurried from the closet and shut the door behind her.

Careful. That was what she needed to be. If the magic was going to keep changing her, she couldn't afford to lose track of which impulses belonged to her and which ones had been planted there. There was a difference between choosing to experiment and simply being pushed into something because the closet had decided it would be amusing. She wasn't going to let a room full of pink clothes make her decisions for her.

Getting dressed didn't take long. The makeup did. So did the hair. Somehow her normal style didn't seem right that morning. She fussed for longer than she realized, doing and redoing her face, styling and restyling her hair. Finally she settled on a new look, one more playful, one more daring. Stacy stood in front of the mirror for far longer than she wanted to admit, adjusting one thing, then another. Two long ponytails running down the sides of her head. Red lips and blue eyeshadow. A dress so short she could see her ass cheeks.

Nothing looked wrong. Everything was wrong. The woman staring back at her looked good.

Very good.

Revealing herself to Evan suddenly felt far more intimidating than it should have. This wasn't simply putting on a new outfit. It was like gambling with her future. But for the first time since the latest change, Stacy thought she might actually have a strategy. Not a way to reverse the potion. But perhaps a way to make the situation bearable. Maybe there was a path through all of this that didn't involve fighting every second of every day.

If Evan rejected her, though, what happened? The question had been lurking underneath everything else. The magic had already demonstrated that it could make her life worse whenever she resisted. If Evan wanted nothing to do with her romantically, would the magic simply find another way to force them together? Or worse, find a way to torture her, mocking her with her own desires, tricking her, redefining her until she no longer even knew who she was?

Stacy didn't know.

That uncertainty frightened her more than the closet did.

She needed Evan to want her. She needed him to love her. And, somehow, she needed to learn how to love him. The three thoughts sat together in her mind, equally terrifying.

Stacy adjusted the hem of the pink dress one last time, pulling it down for more coverage, then immediately pulling it back up for more skin.

"Well," she murmured to her reflection, "nothing else I've tried has worked." A small, humourless smile appeared. "Why not this?"

Opening the bedroom door, Stacy stepped into the hallway. Each footstep toward the stairs felt heavier than the last. The heels clicked against the floor, announcing her approach before she could even see Evan. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, her confidence had almost disappeared.

Almost.

Stacy paused at the edge of the room where Evan was waiting for her, suddenly wondering if she'd made the biggest mistake of her life. Then she remembered the alternative. Another magical rewrite. Another loss of control. Another day spent reacting to whatever the potion decided she was supposed to become.

No.

This time, she was going to make a choice.

Even if she had no idea whether it was the right one.