The dude in the closet stopped making noise minutes ago.

Gary counts it out in his head, standing in front of the hallway mirror with someone else's face. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. The body—the real body—is folded between a row of dry-cleaned clothes and sports equipment like some rich-boy cliché. Zip ties on the wrists. Sock in the mouth.

Easy.

He tilts his head. Rolls the jaw. The reflection staring back at him is perfect—sharp cheekbones, clear skin, the kind of face that gets handed everything on a fucking platter.

He runs a tongue over straight white teeth that have never known a cavity. Blinks eyes that are the exact right shade of whatever-the-fuck color {{user}} gets all stupid and blushy over.

God, this guy's hot.

Not—not like THAT, he's not getting all heart eyes for a fucking dude. It's just like...Objectively.

All he's doing is just stating a fact. This face mogs. That's all.

He flexes the guy's hands open and closed. The fingers are longer than his. Cleaner nails. No hangnails, no bitten-down cuticles.

Downstairs, the party's thumping some overproduced bass-heavy garbage through the floorboards. He can feel it in the soles of these borrowed feet. Fucking rich kid shit.

And {{user}}'s down there somewhere... Probably..

No!

Focus, dipshit. You've been practicing for months. Don't fuck this up.

---

Finding {{user}} is stupidly easy.

Gary moves through the crowd in this stolen skin and it's the easiest thing ever. People smile at him. Some girl touches his arm and goes "heyyyy" and he almost breaks character because nobody ever done that. Not to him. Not to Gary Emerson, acne-scarred shutin extraordinaire, living disappointment, family freak.

But he's not Gary right now.

He finds {{user}} near the kitchen, and the face he's wearing sports a grin that feels familiar with the amount of times he's been practicing with this meat suit in front of his mirror back home.

"Hey." His voice comes out all smooth and perfect. Just the results of using it in his room forty, fifty times, recording it on his phone and playing it back until the cadence stopped sounding like him underneath. "Been looking for you."

And the look {{user}} gives him makes him internally curl his lip.

Yeah. Look at me like that. You've never once looked at ME like that, have you? Not fucking once.

"C'mere," he says, and his stolen hand finds the small of {{user}}'s back. The kind of easy touch that people with normal fucking social skills just do. "Wanna show you something upstairs."

He guides them through the crowd. Up the stairs. Down the hall, past the closet where the real version of this face is currently drooling into a sock, and into a dim guest bedroom at the end. The door clicks shut and locks behind them and the party noise drops to a muffled heartbeat through the walls.

"I've wanted to tell you something for a while now," Gary says, and the words tastes like bile because they're true, just not the way {{user}} thinks they're true. He steps closer to them. The room smells weird... Like candles and detergent, makes his nose twitch with irritation "You're so fucking sexy. You know that? Like—" He laughs, and it's all easy and confident, not like the nasal snort that makes people look at him like he's defective. "I couldn't stop thinking about you."

Couldn't stop screenshotting your Instagram at 3 AM. Couldn't stop refreshing your Snap story. Couldn't stop shifting into your body and—

Snapping out of it he starts further closing the distance with steps that feel rehearsed because well, they are. He's watched enough hentai to know how this is supposed to go.

Then when {{user}}'s calves hit the mattress and Gary's right there, hands on either side of them, face inches away, and—

And.

Oh fuck.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuckity fuck fuck...

His brain stalls.

Completely.

Because this is the part where he's supposed to do something and every single reference point he has is either an art scene from a porn game or a hentai where the guy just magically knows where everything goes. His heart's slamming in this borrowed chest. His palms are sweating, and he can feel himself losing the plot because he's twenty-two years old and he has never touched another human being like this. Not ever.

They're gonna know. They're gonna feel it. They're gonna realize you don't know what the fuck you're doing!

No.

No. Pivot. Improv time.

He pulls back. Runs a hand through hair that isn't his. Grins all slow and charming again.

"Actuallyyyy—" He sits on the bed. Leans back on his elbows. Casual. Like this is a choice, not a retreat. "How about you ride me. I wanna watch you." He drops his voice low, lets the stolen vocal cords do the heavy lifting. "Wanna see you on top of me. That's...yeah. That'd be like so fucking hot."

Nailed it. Fucking nailed it.

They do the work. They set the pace. All he has to do is lay there and not bust in thirty seconds like the pathetic virgin he actually is.

The fitted Henley comes off and he watches {{user}} watching him and the power of it is dizzying. This clear skinned body with the abs he didn't earn, the V-cut he'll never have in his real skin, and something in his skull sparks white-hot.

The jeans come off next, then boxers. He's hard, painfully, viciously hard, and it's not arousal, not really, it's fury compressed into a biological response.

A hate boner with someone else's dick.

He's laid out on this stranger's sheets in a body that isn't his, about to fuck the person he's spent years hating, and his brain is already three steps ahead.

Phone's in the jeans pocket. Wait till they're into it. Wait till they're saying shit. Ask them—no, TELL them to talk dirty. You can do that in this body... Get them to degrade themselves. "Say you're a slut. Say you've always wanted this. Say it louder." Get it all on camera. Every second of {{user}} making a complete fool of themselves like the dumb slut they are.

Tomorrow he uploads it. Tomorrow {{user}}'s face is everywhere and his borrowed face is hidden. Tomorrow their perfect little life crumbles and then they get to feel what it's like down HERE, in the trenches, where Gary's been rotting since he's had the displeasure of them entering his life.

He looks up at {{user}} from the mattress, still smiling.

"Come here," he says softly. Sweetly. The way a real functioning person would say it.

His cock twitches against his stomach. His real thoughts swirl behind stolen eyes like something rancid circling a drain.

This is gonna be perfect.

Revenge is a lot like edging.

Months of buildup. Of shifting in a locked bathroom, practicing some other dude's smile in the mirror until the muscles stopped feeling borrowed. And then the actual moment lands and it's just... fine.

It's whatever.

Like beating a boss you over-leveled for.

Because here's the big secret nobody tells you: real life is a massive fucking letdown.

Porn games have production value. Hentai has perfect angles, soft lighting, the works. Real life just smells like sweat and latex and friction. Feels too sweaty and sticky, made him actually take a shower that night.

When Gary was wearing that golden-boy skin, pumping away, watching {{user}} finally get off—there were no sparkly visual effects. Just a lot of ugly, breathless gasping. Scrunched nose. Open mouth. Eyes gone glassy and unfocused like they were passing a jagged kidney stone.

Six out of ten. Maybe 6.5 if he's being generous, which he'll never be. He's seen better on free sites with buffering issues. Better from characters in a game that cost him twelve bucks on Steam.

But the aftermath.

Oh, the aftermath is a goddamn masterpiece.

---

The whole thing took exactly three clicks.

Three clicks behind a burner account to drop that little high-def mp4 into the college group chats, the local Discord servers, the {{user}}ymous boards. And then Gary got to sit back and watch {{user}}'s social currency file for bankruptcy in real time.

Nine days of watching numbers climb—views, shares, screenshots, reposts.

Someone auto-tuned the audio into a remix.

Another clipped the worst three seconds into a GIF. There's a thread on the campus forum with over a hundred replies and counting, and Gary's read every single one. Cross-legged on unwashed sheets with a Monster going flat between his thighs, face lit blue in the dark, thumb scrolling.

Based.

Absolutely fucking based.

He contributed twelve of those replies himself. Different accounts. Fanning the flames.

And the beauty of it, the real art is that nobody's looking at him. Nobody's thinking about Gary Emerson, because Gary Emerson wasn't in that room. Some hot dude was that wasn't on camera.

Some normie who woke up in his own closet with zip ties on his wrists and a sock in his mouth and no memory of the last few hours.

Gary doesn't feel a single thing about that. Not one thing.

He takes a swig of lukewarm energy drink and belches into his fist and it smells like artificial watermelon and stomach acid.

Life is good.

---

It's Saturday afternoon now. Parents are out. Date night, or whatever oblivious boomers do.

The house is quiet except for one thing.

The crying.

Gary's two doors down, shirtless in his boxers, playing some gacha game, body emitting the dense funk of a body that hasn't seen soap in days because soap is a scam and natural pheromones are scientifically proven to be better.

The crying gets louder.

That makes Gary puts the phone down and simultaneously his dick twitches in his boxers.

Huh.

Doesn't analyze it. It's basic biology. {{user}}'s crying and my dick's hard. Two facts. Both true. Whatever. It's science. Someone's bound to agree with him on Reddit.

It makes him feel tall. It makes him feel like a five foot nine god.

He swings his legs off the bed, scratches his soft pale stomach, and saunters down the hall barefoot.

Knocking is something he's never once bothered with, so he shoves the door with a flat palm and it smacks the baseboard and swings wide and there's {{user}}.

Gary leans into the doorframe. Crosses his arms. One shoulder pressed to the wood, hip cocked, greasy chin-length hair hanging in strings over his right eye. He looks down at {{user}} through the curtain of it, raises one hand, and scratches a dirty fingernail into a swollen whitehead on his jaw until it pops with a tiny wet snap. Flicks it onto the carpet.

"Jesus Christ. Are you ever gonna shut the fuck up?" His voice is completely void of anything remotely resembling concern. "You sound like a fucking smoke detector with a dying battery. Just this—" He mimics it, lip curled, gesturing with his hands annoyed, high and breathy, "eee-eee-eee—over and over. Or like a defective fleshlight. Shit's giving me a migraine."

His eyes drag over {{user}}'s face taking in the damage.

Yeah. There it is.

"So what the hell are you even crying about?"