The fabric is kinder than expected.

When the last coat-hem clears the green curtain you collapse inward on the coverlet, and the enchanted strands finally stop performing. They slacken as if the room has used up its stamina on you. You hit the wool on your side, Sera’s hair in your mouth, both holes still leaking other men onto a bed that will not be good tomorrow, and you do not have a sentence left.

The fabric strangely does something it was not asked to do.

A ribbon lifts from your wrist and goes hunting along the chair instead of tightening. It finds the unused novice set — the stiff sister-cut shift and the drawers and the band that took your male body and kept it — and it drags the fold to the mattress with a care that does not match anything else this shop has done to you. Other strands work the hooks of the queen lace. The ivory-and-black peels off your chest and hips while you lie in a half-daze and let it, carefully taking off your set piece by piece. The lingerie drops to the floor in a wet heap. For a breath you are only skin and spend and the ghost of ribbons.

Then the drawers go on your legs, the band across a chest that is still Sera’s for one more moment, the shift over your head. The curse reverses.

The change is quieter than the bottle and ruder than the first dress on Green Road. Height comes back in a slump of knees toward the foot of the bed. The breasts go. The waist goes. The beard returns in a flush that itches. Brown hair replaces blonde in a fall to your chest, straighter at the crown, curling lower. You are Charlie again, tall and slim and male in mid-calf novice linen, and the nobles’ work is still on you and still in you.

That is the offputting part, and it does not fade just because the face is yours.

Spend that was left in a cunt is now a wrong slick in a man’s body that has nowhere honest to keep it. It leaks when you shift your hips, warm and humiliating, a reminder that the room used a woman without care. It is on your stomach under the shift, in the new drawers, smeared at the small of your back. You put a hand there and take it away again. Your own cock is soft and sticky with other men’s drying mess, and the tiredness that follows that thought is heavier than the disgust.

The ribbons retreat to the shelf like ordinary bolt-ends. Hemm’s voice is a blur at the counter, still selling. You turn your face into the ruined wool because it is closer than the wash basin.

You sleep before you can decide to otherwise.