Culture Shock Part 13

"You make it sound so simple." She rubbed her forehead. "I'm so tired of pretending to be you." Standing, she took off her jacket and hung it on the back of the kitchen chair. "I'm not even sure what it was about you that attracted me in the first place."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, you really find out what a guy is like when you hang around in his locker room...and in his body. Evidently, you're a womanizing jerk."

"I am not!"

"Are too."

"Am not. I should know."

She leered at him. "Then explain why...." She swallowed hard. "Why I...you get an erection every time a good looking woman pa.s.ses by. It's totally embarra.s.sing. Evidently there's still a part of your brain that stayed behind."

"Hey! Don't blame me. You tell me why you're getting them. Maybe you're attracted to other females because it didn't happen to me all that often. Maybe you're hornier than you think."

"How dare you...you...you..."

Alex had never seen that look on his own face; someone about to cry. "Oh, let's not fight. Come here." He stood and held out his arms.

When Cynthia walked willingly into them, Alex felt strange. This was the first moment of any type of intimacy since the switch. In a normal instance, she would rest her head against his shoulder and he would comfort her, but in their present condition and his five-foot-three-inch stature, she towered over him.

With his arms around her waist, he looked up into his own face. "This is so weird. I really would like to kiss you, but looking at myself kills the moment."

She crinkled his nose. "I know what you mean. I've never been attracted to short men, let alone short women. It actually seems unnatural to think about kissing you."

They shared a laugh, and even with her manly chuckle, there was something about her mannerisms and body language that warmed Alex. "What say we close our eyes and give it a try? The kiss, I mean."

"You're kidding? You just said...."

He hesitated. "Let's sit on the couch. Then the height difference doesn't come into play quite as much."

Cynthia sat first, and Alex followed. "Who should go first?" she asked, raising a brow.

"Ladies first, they always say."

She closed her eyes and inched her face in his direction.

Alex gulped. "This is so weird. Okay, I'm closing my eyes."

Their lips met. He tried with all his might to pretend he was in his own body, but the sensation was too strange. Her kiss was nothing like he recalled, and the sickening idea that he was tasting his own tongue killed the moment. He pulled back.

She opened her eyes and licked her lips. "Boy, that was bizarre."

"I'll say. But, at least there was one good thing about it."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Now we each know how we kiss, and I guess I'm not so bad." He laughed.

She shook her head. "How can you make a joke out of everything? She stood and started pacing. "I want things back like they were."

"I know." His gaze followed her back and forth. "I'm sorry. I'm just trying to make the best out of an awkward moment."

She sagged on the arm of the chair. "And I'm sorry for being such a grump. If I could cry, I would. What if we have to stay like this forever?"

Alex shook his head. "Please stop saying that!"

Chapter Fourteen.

Cynthia stood at Alex's locker and finished changing. She'd arrived early, hoping for a moment alone to run Peter Sorenson's name through the system. The room, strangely quiet and empty, created a spooky feeling. The eerie squeal of the closing locker door sent a s.h.i.+ver through her. She squared Alex's broad shoulders and manned-up. The graveyard s.h.i.+ft would be coming off duty shortly, so perhaps she'd have access to the computer without notice.

She crept out into the empty hallway, scanning both directions. Two officers at the other end of the corridor were engrossed in conversation and paid her no mind. She ducked into the computer room that she found empty as she'd hoped. Running names was a routine procedure, but she didn't want to explain to anyone why she was checking out Peter Sorenson.

Her nervous fingers poised on the keys, she started typing. Alex's hairy knuckles made her grimace. How she missed her soft, unblemished hands and pretty fingernails, among other things.

She pushed the thought aside and completed the data entry. After hitting the send key she waited. The few pa.s.sing minutes seemed an eternity. She stiffened in her chair, fearing being caught, but finally the information appeared on the screen. "No priors. No wants, no warrants," she mumbled. She copied down his address, and just for the heck of it, his license number and birth date. Perhaps Alex could use the information in some way. She leaned back and shook her head.

Now what? John Cratski was reported dead and she'd found nothing incriminating on Peter Sorenson.

"What are you doing in here?"

Wallowing in her disappointment, she jumped when Mike poked his head in the door. She cleared her throat. "Nothing. Just killing time until roll call." Her trembling fingers found the "clear screen" b.u.t.ton and depressed it. She stood and ma.s.saged the small of her back. "So, how's the wife?"

She joined him in the hallway and listened to him drone on about Mich.e.l.le, but heard only bits and pieces. Her ears perked at the mention of them trying for a baby.

Especially, when she wanted one of her own. A knot formed in her throat. She'd never discussed being a mother with anyone, but she longed to carry a child, experience the birth and raising of her own son or daughter.

What if she never found a way back to her own body? Motherhood would be out of the question for good. The desire to regain her womanhood fueled her determination to find a way to fix the problem. If she only knew where and how to start.

"Alex. Did you hear what I said?" Mike tapped her on the shoulder. "Alex...."

"What?" Cynthia snapped back to reality.

"What's up with you? The past week you've been acting really strange. Your mind seems like it's somewhere else all the time. Are you okay?"

She wanted to blurt out the truth! No, I'm not okay. I'm really a woman stuck in your partner's body and I want out, is what she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, but instead she carried on her lie. "Nothing's wrong. This case has me baffled, that's all.

Mike slapped her on the shoulder. "I hear ya! Let's get going. It's time for roll call."

"I'm so sick of this." Alex applied the last touches of makeup while he ranted at the mirror. "If I ever get my body back, I'm gonna thank my lucky stars every day I was born a man." He blotted his lipstick on a piece of tissue then threw it in the commode and flushed. The ancient pipes groaned, and he dipped a tense jaw toward the toilet.

"And I'm so sick of you and your noises. Some plumbing. No hot water, no pressure...." He kicked the porcelain.

"Yow," he yelped. Grabbing his toe, he hopped around on one foot. "That was stupid, Alex. Breaking Cynthia's toe is the last thing you need to do." He hobbled into the bedroom.

His ignorant antic made his morning shoe selection even more difficult. With a sore toe, nothing felt right. He considered wearing one fuzzy slipper, but figured that fas.h.i.+on faux pas would draw unwanted attention. Instead he went through the 'shoe de jour' and found the least painful pair of open toed sandals, albeit a little higher than he preferred.

Sitting on the bed, he inserted the throbbing digit into her shoe. He pondered the word 'pair'. Pair of shoes fit, but pair of pants, pair of panties...didn't. And why his thoughts wandered to the ridiculous of late proved the most puzzling of all. Were these things Cynthia considered on a regular basis? He sure as h.e.l.l didn't, at least until now.

He pictured Cynthia sitting at the computer and wondered if she would find anything worthwhile. Being a cop for so many years had given him good intuition, and there had to be a connection between the super, Peter Sorenson and John Cratski. Alex just wasn't sure what the link was.

Funny, his mind's eye still saw Cynthia as a woman, a very s.e.xy woman. His mind drifted to their first meeting. He closed his eye and recalled the feelings she stirred in him. She'd made him feel alive again, revived the desire to be with someone. d.a.m.n, he wanted that chance! And not this way. Maybe he was concentrating too hard on the wrong case. The crime wasn't his only concern.

He rose, grabbed his handbag and limped out the door, still berating himself. He hated taking the train, but he'd be dammed if his anger led him to sticking his foot under a wheel. Look what kicking a commode earned him.

On the way to the BART station, he thought about playing hooky. Cynthia's job was boring and lacked interaction. He'd made it through almost two weeks without anyone questioning why he stayed to himself. But how much longer could he keep everyone at bay? He wasn't used to being a hermit and that's what he was becoming. Did she even socialize at work? Still, if he missed a day, she'd have a cow. Before he realized it, he reached the BART station and had hardly given a thought to his sore toe.

On the train, heading downtown, he unfolded the newspaper he'd purchased at the station. "Another victim found dead." He read the bold headline aloud.

The man next to him looked up with raised eyebrows from his own newspaper, and then went back to reading. Hadn't he ever heard anyone read to himself? People just weren't very friendly anymore. Alex turned his attention back to his own paper.

His stomach turned. One person in particular wasn't friendly at all as evidenced by the column. Three dead, one missing, and one in the hospital. How much longer until the creep kidnapped or murdered again? Alex's hand fisted, wanting...no needing to do his own job. The longer he stayed gone, he more chances women died. He wasn't the crime-solver extraordinaire, but thoughts of his own mother's death haunted him and spurred him to work harder than most.

Despite wanting to detour, Alex walked from the station straight into Cynthia's office. He closed the door and picked up the phone. "Can you talk?" he asked when she answered his cell.

"Yes, Mike's getting coffee."

"The a.s.shole killed someone else. I just read about it."

"I know. We heard about it this morning. Boy, the media picks up on things really fast."

"Yeah, they do. You have to be careful what you say around them, too. You don't want to give anything away."

"Like what? We don't know anything," she said.

"Say we did. If you leaked anything to the press, then the perp would be onto us. Understand?"

"I'm not as dumb as you obviously think. I simply mentioned we don't know anything so there's no danger of the press picking up any unknown clues."

The lack of drive in her voice infused his frustration. "What about Sorenson? Did you run him yet?"

"The report came up empty. He's clean. About the only thing I found was a prior address."

"What is it?" Alex sensed a glimmer of hope.

I didn't get a chance to write it down but I do remember it was in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC."

"Can you go back and get the street and number?"

"I'll try. Mike almost caught me this morning. I'd hate to have to explain all of this to him."

"I think I understand perfectly. I'd be visiting you in a sanitarium," Alex quipped.

"There you go with the jokes again. I don't see anything funny about any of this."

"Neither do I, but if I don't make light of it, I'll go crazy. Trust me. I'm making it my mission to get my body back."

"Okay...yeah. No problem." Her tone changed. "Thanks for letting me know my laundry is ready. I'll pick it up tonight."

Mike must have returned.

Placing the phone back in its cradle, Alex was filled with envy. He wished to h.e.l.l he could be back at work. Instead of doing something positive, something he knew, he had to sit in a stupid office all day and pretend to be Cynthia. He rubbed his brow and took a deep breath.

There had to be something he could do to help pa.s.s the seemingly endless hours. His gaze locked on her monitor. Why hadn't he thought about using the computer before this? He shook his head. Instead of using resources at his fingertips, he'd been too busy obsessing about his inability to be part of a stupid criminal investigation. If he'd spent time researching instead of griping, maybe he could have found something about body transference on the Internet. "Duh-uh, I'm such a dope."

He waited for the system to boot up then scanned the Yahoo search engine, clicking on topics that contained anything about body exchanges. Most pertained to client/psychoa.n.a.lyst relations.h.i.+ps, one featured some gibberish about the body triad: mental, physical and ego, and another about aiding a mummy on its journey. His gaze rested on a fiction novel written on the subject, and he groaned. Nothing on a true experience, but what had he expected? No one would believe such a thing possible. Perhaps he was digging in the wrong place for info.

He switched his search to "body swaps". Most links led him to automobile parts, a few to sites bout cults, and the majority focused on the real deal of changing mates for s.e.x. He was almost sorry he clicked on one of those. It took forever to close all the X-rated pop-ups that came with the original web page. He grumbled as he tried to shut down. With his luck, the s.e.x sites used tracking cookies and her computer would be infested with p.o.r.n.

With perseverance, he succeeded in ridding the screen of all the annoying ads. He surrendered the idea of finding anything of substance and moved to the start-up menu, looking for games. He found only solitaire.

The day pa.s.sed quickly, and at five o'clock all Alex had to show for his trouble was a bad case of eyestrain.

Tired and feeling crankier than usual, Alex opened the front door and stepped into The Cairns' foyer. Spending eight hours pretending to be an accountant wore on his nerves, and his jaw hurt from tensing. He stopped to retrieve his mail from the box in the lobby, and grimaced at the stack of bills he found after not checking for days.

It dawned on him the rent was due. Thoughts of John Cratski/Peter Sorenson crossed his mind. He had to find out the super's true ident.i.ty. There were just too many coincidences between him and the perp. Alex needed to get back into the man's apartment, and what better way than paying his rent in person. He frowned, remembering his circ.u.mstance. If he paid any rent at all, it would be Cynthia's.

"Ms. Freitas. How nice to see you."

Lost in thought, Alex jumped at an all-too-familiar voice. The man obviously walked on his tiptoes.

Alex turned and faced Thomas Carpenter. The creep was totally repulsive, and Alex wanted to tell him so. But he decided to be kind. "Oh, h.e.l.lo, Mr. Carpenter."

The smarmy man ran his scrubby fingers up Alex's arm. "Any chance we might have that dinner sometime soon?"

Alex brushed the hand aside like he was removing dandruff from his sleeve. He was through being polite. "Sorry, not a chance."

Alex spun, wincing at the sore toe, and started up the stairs.

"Well, you be sure to drop by if you change your mind," Carpenter called out.

Alex didn't answer and continued his climb. After unlocking Cynthia's door, he stormed inside and kicked off her shoes so hard they flew across the room. "You are such a mutant ninja turtle, Carpenter," Alex ranted. "Change my mind? Yeah, when it rains indoors." He opened the fridge and pulled out a beer, still raging inside. Was there a woman alive who would date that man?

While opening his brew, he heard keys jangling.

Cynthia entered the apartment with shoulders sloped. She'd picked the right moment, as he'd just released the last of his steam. He settled on the couch with his beer in hand.

She closed the door and sagged against it. "I'm beat. I don't know how much longer I can do this."