While she had embraced her own delusions enough to accept the magical nature of her houseguest, Genie was still dumbstruck by her kitchen appliances.
"Is the fire under the glass?" he asked about her glass top stove. "And where does the smoke come out?" Looking in her refrigerator, he asked how the tiny cubes of ice in the freezer kept the inside of the huge refrigerator so cold. When he asked how the microwave worked, she gave up and simply answered "It's magic"
"Aha!" Genie had nodded as though he suspected as much and was relieved by a simple answer. Then she had turned on the garbage disposal to get rid of the eggshells and he had leapt onto a chair.
"I think my kind was pretty spread out to begin with" Genie said as a preamble to answering her question. "We were part of the old ones, people who fell from the stars when the world was different. We were needed back then to make the world as you know it now. It was solitary work and having too many of us in one place was counterproductive. Too many cooks and all that. When your kind - humans - started to appear, the old ones went away or went to sleep beneath the sea."
Then he continued. "But I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to help people, so I helped your kind for a while. Then one day I decided to take a break from it all and I took a little nap. Next thing I know I woke up trapped inside of that thing." He gestured vaguely toward the lamp. "Since there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it, I entertained myself as best as I could and let the time pass and then you called upon me and set me free! Now I’m bound unto you and must obey your every command!" Genie whistled cheerfully as he refilled her coffee cup.
Amber had always been a pretty good judge of people and she knew when someone was telling her the truth. She watched Genie carefully and understood that he was telling her the absolute truth and yet leaving out lots of details. She shrugged. The past wasn’t as important as the future. "You mean like I’ve got three wishes?" she asked
Genie shook his head and she realized how very handsome he was. He reminded her of the man on her cleaning solution bottle under the sink. "As many as you wish."
"Every command?" Amber asked.
Genie nodded.
"Make me thinner." Her first command came to Amber easily.
"But why do you want me to make you thinner?" Genie protested. "You’re so beautiful just the way you are!"
"And what woman have you seen in the last thousand years to compare me to?" Amber asked. "You have no idea what it’s like to be a full-figured woman in a world full of toothpicks. All the clothes are made to fit them. All the men are taught to be attracted to them. Even the damned cars are getting smaller. I have to starve myself every day just to keep from getting bigger! I want to be just like my sisters and be able to eat whatever I want and stay skinny. I command it!"
Amber suddenly blinked someone else’s eyes and stared at her sister’s face in her sister’s bathroom mirror. Well this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind, but it was still a neat trick! She looked down at her new body and was fascinated to see that she could look past her breasts and hips directly to her toes and everything in between without craning forward.
Hmm….she had always just assumed Jenna had kept herself waxed down there. How silly to be so cute and thin and sexy and leave that one obvious thing unattended. She looked around Jenna’s cluttered bathroom and found the clippers and the razors. She was in the shower making her new body suit her own preferences when she heard heavy footfalls outside the bathroom door and froze. Suddenly, Amber realized she didn’t know any of the men her sisters were involved with, but at least one of Jenna’s male friends had a key to her apartment. This could be interesting.
"Wilma, I’m ho-ome!" yelled the man in a Fred Flintstone impersonation as he walked right into the bathroom and whisked the shower curtain back.
Trying not to panic, Amber noted that he was a stocky, handsome man. She had just finished her shaving and held the razor in one hand as she tried to cover herself. The man’s eyes darted downward.
"Oh. Wow." He drooled a bit as he stood with his mouth open, staring at Amber’s modifications to Jenna’s body. "I just wanted to say hello before you went out with your sister," the man said a bit absently. "But you look so nice and smooth and I just have to taste you right now!"
The man scooped her up into his arms as though Jenna weighed even less than she did and carried her off to bed. Amber giggled. Did this man come with Jenna’s body? He seemed nice enough, and certainly seemed familiar with Jenna to be presuming as much as she did. But counting last night - if that was even real - this was only the second time in her life that Amber would allow someone she didn’t know to give her pleasure.
Before she could process that thought, her inhibitions were eased by the sight of his clear gray eyes looking up at her. He started out by licking her inner thighs tenderly, moving closer and closer to Jenna’s freshly shaven sex. Amber slid her hands down her now flat stomach and guided his head to just the right spot. She moaned softly as his tongue darted here and there and then slipped inside of her. Then her hands moved up her body to fondle her breasts and she realized she was going to have to make some modifications to this body. Jenna’s breasts were so tiny!
The man’s tongue was still busy. He used it to part her wet inner lips and then slowly eased his way up to her clit which seemed desperate for the oral attention he seemed eager to give it. Whoever this guy was, Amber had already decided he could stay as long as he wanted. She ran her fingers through his hair as he continued to lick her, enjoying it so much that her world seemed to revolve around his sweet tongue. He was bringing her closer and closer to the edge and she found it impossible to lie still. She wished she knew his name so she could call it out when she came.
The gibberish that accompanied her climax sounded more like the weird language Genie had used when she first freed him from the lamp. It certainly didn’t sound like English. But that was probably for the best.
Amber pulled Jenna’s lover up to kiss him, savoring the buttery taste of herself on his lips before remembering that it wasn’t really her. She put that thought aside and reached for his belt. Oh yes was she ever going to return the favor!
But the man stood up, moving out of her reach and looking at his watch. "I can’t stay honey, I’m sorry. I’ll let you do anything you want next time you see me. Ok? Have fun tonight." And he was gone.
"What the hell?" Amber said through Jenna’s lips.
That made for two nice orgasms in as many days at the hands of men she didn’t know, but she hadn’t seen an actual cock yet.
"He’ll let me," she mused bitterly. Wanting to be inside of her mouth or pussy should have been enough to make any man willing to be late for work. And then she remembered that it wasn’t her, Amber. Maybe Jenna’s really bad at it, she thought as she began to get ready for her night out with Niki.
Amber, still in Jenna’s body, took quite a bit of time getting dressed. She carefully tried on every outfit Jenna owned and admired herself in the bedroom mirror before arriving at the cutest outfit she could find. She had forgotten that Jenna shared her apartment with their sister Niki until she heard the key in the lock.
A moment later, Niki walked into the bedroom. "Oh good you remembered our double date tonight!" Niki commented and then looked closely at the outfit Amber was wearing. "I thought you didn’t like that dress any more. Didn’t you say it made you feel fat?"
Before Amber could reply, she continued. "You’re going to love this guy I set you up with. Give me just a minute and I’ll be ready too."
Amber was speechless as she stared at the mirror from a thinner body than she had had since puberty. What could possibly make tiny little Jenna feel fat? She turned and looked at herself in the mirror from every angle. She felt weightless enough to take flight! And a double date? But who had she just been with if he wasn’t a steady lover of Jenna’s?
Niki appeared in the doorway, her own outfit less tasteful than the one Amber had picked for Jenna. "Did Joe stop by? He wa
s supposed to leave me some money."
Amber gulped. "Stocky guy? Dark hair? Sorta looks like Fred Flintstone?"
Nicky giggled. "You are such a kidder! You know what my boyfriend looks like!
Again, Niki continued not giving Amber time to reply, which was a good thing. No wonder the guy had been in such a hurry to leave!
"You didn’t tell him we were going out with a couple of guys tonight, did you Sis?" Niki asked her.
"No. No, that didn’t come up," Amber stammered. Trying to keep up with her unintentional deceit was making her head spin.
"Good!" Niki said. "I love that big dumbass but there are some things he just doesn’t need to know!"
Amber hoped that Joe and Niki had one of those don’t look too hard don’t ask don’t tell open relationships or something.
"Of course if I ever catch him playing around, I’ll kill him!" Niki added and then left the room.
Amber wondered if maybe she was confused and that hadn’t really been Joe, but then she heard Niki's voice float in from the kitchen.
"Oh here’s the money! He left it on the kitchen counter. Always good to have. Not that we are going to spend anything if we can help it!"
Amber slowly sat down on the edge of the bed and covered her face, afraid to find out one more detail about either of her sisters.
***
Their dates were handsome and well dressed and worked in something to do with banking. Amber found them both equally shallow and totally uninteresting. She focused on enjoying every last bite of the meal that her date was paying for while occasionally saying something dense and perky that she thought sounded like something Jenna would have said. The meal was exquisite and she savored each bite carefully as she thought what a joy it was to at last be able to eat without consequence. This was what it was like to be alive!
Niki announced a need to visit the ladies room and Amber went with her. On the way, Niki cheerfully calculated aloud how much money the men were spending on them. "If we make them take us clubbing and out to breakfast after then they’ll have spent more than I make all week," Nicky crowed as they went into the bathroom.
Niki headed straight for a stall and closed the door. Amber didn’t feel the need to go and simply checked her makeup for an excuse to look into the mirror and admire herself once again.
The retching from Niki’s stall was audible, which alarmed Amber. She hadn’t seemed to be ill a moment before! What could have happened so quickly? The toilet flushed and Niki emerged dabbing at her lipstick.
"Aren’t you going to purge too, before dessert?" she asked.
Amber felt a sinking sense of loss as she realized how her sisters had been keeping themselves so thin for all these years. She truly felt ill thinking about all the dysfunction inherent in what she’d seen and heard about her sisters from inside Jenna’s head tonight. Woodenly, she walked to a bathroom stall and locked the door.
"Change me back. I command you" she said, somehow knowing that she would be heard and obeyed.
In a flash, she was returned to her own body, her own shape, her own house.
"That’s not what I meant!" Amber snapped angrily at Genie as she touched her breasts unconsciously to make sure they were there.
Genie nodded apologetically "I’m sorry, Ma’am. Magic can be such an imprecise science. Perhaps we can find another way to make you happy, using what we learned from my mistakes to guide us."
"Knowing that my sisters are both trophy-hunting bulimic whack jobs with male attachment issues doesn’t change me wanting to be thinner!" Amber protested. "Whatever issues they have are different from mine. I just want to like my body again and feel good in it, the way I did when I was with Richard. He always made me feel good. I miss that. I want that feeling back! "
The universe tilted and Amber found herself in an apartment she’d never seen before. She found a mirror and looked at a face she didn’t recognize. Then she looked at the pictures on the wall and she understood. There was a ring on her finger. So he’d gotten married. Not to the student he’d left Amber for, but to someone else entirely. At least that someone else was thin. She looked outside the window and saw an unfamiliar skyline and a setting sun.
Amber undressed her new body completely except for the shoes and earrings, and then put on an apron and went into the kitchen and began cooking dinner for her husband. It was after dark and supper had gone cold on the table and she had given up and gotten dressed again when the phone rang. Amber answered it with another woman’s trembling voice. She didn’t realize she had been sobbing quietly, her heart broken.
"It’s me, Jessica," Richard's voice said. "I’m so sorry but I will be stuck here just a while longer. Dr. Emerson kept me in his office later than I really thought was necessary going over some curriculum changes and new university policies, and I still have a ton of paperwork to go through. I’ll be home as soon as I can, darling."
Amber held the phone tightly with Jessica’s hand and said nothing. Having too many conversations like this with Richard had taught her what constant lies sounded like. She knew that if she kept him on the phone long enough she’d hear the other woman in the room with him make a sound of some sort. He hadn’t changed a bit. She sat the phone on the counter without hanging it up and walked over to the mantle to look at the wedding pictures there. Jessica had kept her figure, she saw, looking from the photographs to the wall mirror. But Richard had gotten heavier and older. Never growing up had aged him, Amber thought.
She walked past the phone and Richard’s squawking voice coming out of it to a small home office area. She touched a button on Richard’s home computer and a password screen came up. Grimly she typed the numbers she remembered he used for all passwords and opened up his stored photograph folder. In another apartment in another city while wearing another skin she had discovered the identity of the skinny student he had left her for with the same minimal investigation.
A long while later she was still sitting at the computer in disbelief, after going through every photograph stored there. All the pictures he had on it were old ones of Amber. Some were of her in provocative poses and states of undress taken by Richard. Some of them were taken after she had gained a few pounds, but he had them right next to pictures of her when she had been thinner.
"I guess all you want is those things you can’t have, Richard," she said to the squawking receiver on the kitchen island. "Take me back home, Genie."
Amber was heard and obeyed. She left Jessica’s body where she had been sitting, in front of Richard’s computer with the picture file open.
Back in her own skin, in her own house Genie stood in front of her, his arms crossed, his bald head bowed. Now, he really did look like the cleaning solution guy. "If you truly want to be someone else, Ma'am, I can give you that. But I cannot make you stay happy with what you will have. It has never worked for anyone. They all either drive themselves to destruction or the wiser one ones use one last wish to order me back into the lamp and cast me away again. I used to think I was just horrible at my job, but now I realize that people just always ask for the wrong things. If I could I would make you happy with yourself right this moment, because you are the most beautiful being I have ever seen and I don't want to change one single square inch of you."
Suddenly, Amber realized Genie’s cheeks were wet with tears, and her heart melted. She put her arms around his neck and stood up on tiptoes to kiss him. He responded with an intensity that belied his proper and subservient manners and she drew back, surprised. "You love me," she said, incredulously.
He nodded '"I've been watching you for a long time from inside the lamp," he said. "And I hoped you would find me."
She kissed him again, and let him kiss her back. There was something familiar about that kiss. She backed away suspiciously. "Joe?" she asked him.
Genie nodded, looking guiltier than anyone she had ever seen before. "That was me," he said quietly. "I intercepted him and took his place. I couldn’t let him have you even once, even if
I couldn’t do all the things myself that he had planned."
She'd left some business unfinished twice now, Amber realized, and her body was aching for a man’s touch. For this man’s touch - every inch of him. Boldly, she started to open his robe.
"I can’t," Genie said, gently pulling out of her grasp. "My kind doesn't have...we aren't allowed to….it’s complicated."
Amber parted his garments and gazed down at the area below his belt. He had no genitalia. As smooth and as pure as a Ken doll. She understood the funnel of smoke now, her dreams of riding the wave. He’d loved her from within her mind rather than from within her body as she had believed. She knelt down and kissed him where she’d intended to anyway. Genie shivered with pleasure.
"Do you wish you could be a mortal man and be with me? Would you live with me? Make love to me?" she asked, gazing up into his eyes.
Genie nodded, the tears beginning to dry on his face. "Yes, Ma'am, I do. More than anything. But I can't grant my own wishes. It doesn't work that way."
Amber stood up and on tiptoe again and whispered in his ear "I wish you weren't a magical being who can make things from magic, but a mortal man, with an entire man’s body, who will live my life with me and love me just as I am and just as you do now. I want us to forget that you ever could make magic. I finally understand what it means to be content with what I am and what I have. I don't want to dwell on what we won't have or what I could have asked you for. I only want to find contentment in what we will have in each other. Make it so Genie, my love. I command it!"
And then she kissed him while the universe turned inside out one more time to adjust itself to her final wish. It involved having to adjust for some things which had been a certain way for a long time and now not only had to be different but had to have always been different. Free will doesn’t come into play until after the universe has put us where it wants us to be, but the decisions which we use free will to make can change the universe.
Star-Crossed Curves: BBW Erotic Romance Boxed Set Page 21