Collide Into You: A Romantic Gender Swap Love Story (18 page)

“Keira?” a man’s voice says on the other end. He almost sounds confused. “This is Alec. We met last night…” His voice trails off.

Wow
, I think. It’s telling that someone like Alec Huffman would be uncertain if a girl remembered him or not. While it may be a mean thought, other than Jon and Tanner, how many men call for Keira?

“Hi.” I clear my throat. What would Keira say in this situation? I mean, other than
hi
? It’s not exactly easy being a girl when said girl is staring at you like she wants to murder you. “Hi,” I say again, but louder.
The man’s not deaf, Dillan.
If I just keep saying hi, maybe
he
will end the call. God, when did I become a pansy? Probably the second I was transported into someone else’s body.

Keira continues to glare at me, all the while motioning at the watch on her wrist.
Hurry it up
, her expression declares.
Or I will shove you down the drainage pipe.

“Hi,” Alec says with a touch of humor. He must think I’m nervous. Seriously, he has no clue. “So…” Alec says. “I was wondering…if you don’t already have plans for tonight, would you like to go out on a date with me?”

I’m speechless. Keira’s looking at me like,
you better tell me what he’s saying,
and all I can think of is that a Major League Baseball player just asked me out. There’s something giddy-feeling about being asked out on a date. Even if I am living it through Keira’s eyes.

It feels like I’m smiling. The muscles around my mouth are stretched out as I say, “Yeah, I’d like that. Pick me up at eight.”

Keira

C
ALMLY
, I
TAKE
MY
PHONE
out of Dillan’s hands and walk into the apartment’s lobby entrance. Dillan’s on my heels, trying to explain how and why he just agreed to go on a date with Alec Huffman.

“He was extremely persuasive,” Dillan says with a little bit too much glee. He’s proud of himself. He thinks he’s got the best of me. “Alec never gave me the opportunity to say no.”

I jam my thumb on the elevator’s up button. When it doesn’t come down in the five seconds I’ve allotted for it to do my bidding, I pivot left, open the door to the stairwell, and run up. Dillan follows. Which is what I expected. What I don’t expect is to be winded after about two flights of stairs, but I keep running. Even if it kills me.

“No one can be that persuasive in a one-minute phone call,” I say in between breaths. I feel like I’m a car that’s been rearranged to walk on two legs. “You really need to work on your aerobics, Dillan.”
 

“Don’t you want to know what he said about you?” Dillan asks. I stop suddenly and he smacks into me. I have to catch onto my own body to keep Dillan from flying backward down the stairs. “Thanks,” I hear my own voice tell me.

“No,” I say. We’ve stopped at the fifth floor. I need a break.

“No…what?”

“No, I don’t want to know what he said about me.”
 

Dillan gives me a puzzled look. “I don’t believe you’re being honest with me. And…with yourself. How can you
not
want to know what he said?”

This stops me in my tracks even though I’m not moving. I can’t…I just can’t. Love is unpredictable. It’s unstable. And looking at
myself
and hearing
my own voice
ask me that question makes this entire situation highly unfair. It’s like a slap in the face.

But I have to ask myself: Am I interested in Alec Huffman? No. Not really. Well. Maybe I am. I don’t know. I’m flattered. There. I can admit that.

“I don’t want to know because I’m not vain,” I finally answer. “Also, you weren’t on the phone long enough to discuss me.”
 

I had been inspecting Dillan’s watch like a hawk when he was on the phone with Alec, so I know that in the seventy-one seconds he was on the phone, forty were devoted to saying
hi
like an idiot. The rest, well, the rest was Dillan agreeing to a date. There wasn’t much room left to compliment me considering that I had taken the phone out of Dillan’s hands after hearing the words,
“Yeah, I’d like that. Pick me up at eight.”
I hung the phone up without a second’s hesitation.

A group of teenage boys holding skateboards come down the stairs and around us. Dillan moves and begins to take the stairs two at a time. He shouts down, “You are no fun. Arguably, the most famous player for the Washington Nationals wants to date you and what do you do? You hang up the phone on Alec Huffman.”

 
Dillan keeps going up as the teenagers gasp while looking me—inspecting Dillan’s body—over.
 

“Dude,” one of the boys says. “I didn’t know that Alec Huffman was gay.”

I’m not surprised that they have mistaken the situation entirely. It certainly doesn’t help that my idiot roommate had to shout down a statement that made it sound like Alec Huffman had asked out another man.

“My sister is going to snap,” another one says. They keep talking, but after two floors, their conversation is too low for me to hear.

His sister isn’t the only one who’s going to snap.

Dillan

F
OR
THE
MAJORITY
OF
THE
day, Keira hibernates in her room—her real room—and keeps the door closed. At times, I hear sounds from the television from her room waft into the living room, but she keeps to herself. I’d prefer it if we could work this situation out together. Keira must feel otherwise.

Other than the challenge of being a woman for the next few days, the only other challenge I can think of is the Joy Fromm case.

I plop on the couch—it’s still on the other side of the room; we never moved the furniture back after that silly plan of running into each other—and busy myself with reading the case file on the company.
 

Tucked in a folder is a picture of Amanda Joy. Sixty-five with a short, silver bob, her professional head shot isn’t unlike anyone else in her position: CEO of a business. Powerful. Smart. Diabolical. She looks the part. She also looks like she could eat children for dinner, but even I have to admit that in order for women to break through the glass ceiling, they have to take on strong, competitive personas that, while these personas could rival that of their male counterparts, often landed them the labels of bitches or backstabbers.

My experience with LouAnn Britton taught me that this isn’t the norm and that women bosses are the best kind out there. Tough, but effective. Kind, but aggressive. Caring, but not emotional. LouAnn, for all her redeeming qualities, is someone I highly respect. Even when she loans me out to the wolves.

Speaking of wolves, I pull out a picture of Ken Fromm. He is in his late thirties; a product of his father’s second marriage after a disastrous divorce to Amanda’s mother, and handsome enough to charm his way through any obstacle. Ken’s Ivy League upbringing contrasts with Amanda’s. Her father wasn’t yet successful during her early years, and by the time Ken was born—the elder Mr. Fromm had married his mistress—Amanda was already running a good portion of her father’s business.

One might argue that it was
because
of Amanda Joy, then Amanda Fromm, that her father’s business took off. Savvy marketing, wise mergers, a solid business plan, and the fact that Amanda was a military veteran elevated Joy Fromm Acquisitions within the ranks of defense contractors.
 

Ken came on board and took everything apart—the integration between all departments; the single-layer leadership that allowed for seamless transparency—and, in its place, installed an antiquated hierarchy that never matched what Amanda Joy had built up over the years. Stovepipes were created, meaning departments stopped communicating. The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing.
 

The company hemorrhaged. It lost contracts. Employees fled. And, for the final nail in the coffin, the elder Mr. Fromm died, leaving his company—and his family, one might argue—to pick up the pieces.

A company can have but one captain. But who was it going to be? Amanda Joy or Ken Fromm?

That’s what LouAnn, and Johnson Brookshire, need me to figure out and implement. Not only that, I have to get both Amanda Joy and Ken Fromm to agree. It will be a challenge. A huge challenge. This must be what Ellen meant when she said I could use a challenge.

If not, then we’re screwed.

When I look up from Ken Fromm’s picture, Stacey, who somehow entered the apartment as quietly as a ninja, is staring at me.

Keira

I
FORGOT
ABOUT
S
TACEY
. I
T
’
S
only after the front door opens and closes and hearing voices that I realize she’s in the living room. How could I forget that Dillan has a girlfriend? I don’t want to have to deal with a
girlfriend
while I’m trying to figure this whole thing out.
 

“This is just weird,” I hear Stacey say. “Keira, why are you reading Dillan’s work files?”

I put down an Army manual on written-materials-slash-official-correspondence and quietly inch my bedroom door open, just enough to see and hear how Dillan responds.
 

Stacey’s back is to me. I don’t have time to admire her linen shorts, her crazy long legs, or her long blonde hair. I’m focused on the scene before me.

My body sits on the couch. Folders and pictures are scattered around Dillan. He’s a little like me: when we get into a project, we really immerse ourselves wholly. That’s why, even after feeling hopeless for the last few hours, I have every confidence that between the two of us, we’ll figure this out.

I don’t blame Stacey for questioning me, er, my body. By all outward appearances, it looks odd that Keira would be studying Dillan’s materials.

I see Dillan turn toward Stacey. Thankfully, he doesn’t look scared or excited or shocked. I have to remember that Dillan is a smooth guy. He can charm the venom out of a snake if he has to.
 

“Hi Stacey,” I hear my voice say from the living room. From my bedroom door, still barely cracked open, I’m holding my breath. “You just missed Dillan’s boss,” Dillan says.

Stacey scrunches her nose. “LouAnn was here?” Was there a challenge in her voice? Okay, maybe I’m just being paranoid.

Regardless, I start ticking off reasons to break up with her. Thumb: I’m not ready for a commitment. Index finger: I don’t deserve you. Middle finger: I’m interested in someone else. Ring finger: My life is a little too complicated at the moment for a relationship and I don’t want to hurt you. Pinky finger: I’m moving to another country.

Dillan and I haven’t come up with a reason for, well, about anything if we encountered someone who knows us. I probably shouldn’t have shut myself in my bedroom the moment we came back from Ellen’s Corner Bakery, but I do my best thinking when my own body isn’t looking at me or questioning me.

Granted, this is a brand new problem for me, but, still…I should be afforded an opportunity to decompress.

On second thought, maybe avoiding Stacey altogether might be the best plan. I mean, this is Dillan we’re talking about. How long would the relationship have lasted in the first place? Exactly.

Dillan responds, “Yeah. I like LouAnn a lot. She reminds me of an Army general, but, you know, more fashionable. Anyway, she had a great idea. Dillan is, uh, stumped on his current project, so she suggested I take a look at everything and offer an opinion. I just love, love, love regulations and stuff. Plus, it turns out this company has Department of Defense contracts and connections. That’s really what she wanted me to look at.”

I just love, love, love regulations and stuff?
My God, does he have to lay it on so thick? I mean, I do love regulations, but I would never say it like
that
. However, Stacey seems to buy it, and as far as explanations go, it isn’t a bad one. Not great, but it was fairly adequate in the moment.

“Did he leave with LouAnn?” Stacey asks. She looks around the room and cranes her neck to look into Dillan’s room. The door is wide open. As usual. Other than the pigsty contained therein, there isn’t much to see.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Dillan says, and I watch as he shrugs my shoulders to make it appear as if it is something that Keira couldn’t care less about. Twenty-four hours ago, that statement would have been one hundred percent true. Now, not so much. “All I know is that LouAnn left a few moments ago. It’s possible that Dillan went with her. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Stacey moves and I lose my visual advantage. All I know is I cannot leave this room looking like Dillan unless Stacey either leaves the apartment or goes into the bathroom. God, I’ve never wished for someone to have to pee as much as I want Stacey to right now. I’d even welcome her writing another lipstick note on the mirror.

“What happened to the living room?” Stacey asks from the other side of the room. I still can’t see her.

“I think Dillan got bored last night or this morning. It was like this when I woke up.”

Stacey laughs. “He does like to rearrange furniture for some reason. Now, why he would put everything into one corner is somewhat mystifying. Speaking of mystifying, I think I’ll wait in his bedroom and surprise him when he gets back. Don’t say anything, okay?”

A grin spreads on Dillan’s face. He can’t wait to see what happens when his body finally makes an appearance.

“I wouldn’t dream of ruining your surprise, Stacey,” my voice says back to her.

Dillan’s bedroom door closes behind Stacey. I give it a few minutes before I leave my bedroom. It takes everything within me not to pummel Dillan. The shit-eating grin on my feminine face irritates the hell out of me.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Dillan says.

He doesn’t have to worry. I don’t plan to.

Dillan

P
ART
OF
ME
WANTS
NOTHING
more than for Stacey to drag Keira—my body—back to my room and ravish her. Oh, Keira wouldn’t have a problem stopping whatever Stacey had planned. And knowing Keira, she has no interest in having
sex done upon her body
—whether it’s her in my body, or me in hers.