CLEANER II: Chapter One - Part Two

MELISSA

The hotel was close to the airport in Rhodes and it was a first real step into how the other half lived.

It wasn’t somewhere we were staying for more than one night but the luxury compared to anything I'd ever experienced was substantial. The bathroom was gigantic. The bed was big enough for three or four people to sleep in comfortably (or two of me).

As soon as I was fully in with all my stuff I shut out the day and switched on the air conditioning. The heat had given me a bit of trouble so far. I just wasn’t used to it. My fat didn’t help. I had a swath of damp, itchy skin under my boobs that I'd had to resist scratching as I was riding up in the elevator.

This was the first time I'd been properly alone since Dahlia picked me up in her taxi and whisked me off to the airport and it felt good. There was a tremendous build-up of excitement when she was there, an expectation of the as-yet incomplete plan we were brewing becoming a reality, but I needed the time now to gather my thoughts.

I sat on the bed and immediately let myself fall back, feet still flat on the floor, letting out a great whoosh of air. For a few minutes I tried to still my thoughts in the dimness under my eyelids, but as it went on, glimmers of thought sparkled in the darkness, distracting me.

There was just too much going on in my brain right now to ever truly relax. Overnight I’d had no more than four hours of exhausted sleep before I came awake and lay shuffling and lonely for the rest of the night, hating the snuffling sound of my husband Robert’s laboured snoring beside me.

We were really doing this. We were really going to swap places; change the way our bodies looked.

“I want you to go into training,” she’d said. “I want you to diet and work out until you’ve lost weight; a lot of weight.”

Could that happen? Really? Yes, I could lose weight if I put my mind to it – a lot of weight even, if I became fanatical in a way my willpower had never allowed before. But was it feasible that we could effectively trade places, as though a magic wand had been swung?

Of course not. No. Surely.

But Dahlia’s eyes had gleamed brightly enough in the darkness on the side of the dual carriageway to make me think that anything was possible. I had organised the plane tickets and the packing since then but she had glittered with the potential ahead of us that she was clearly seeing in her mind’s eye and believing.

It made me more eager to get downstairs to meet her and hear her thoughts. I had some thoughts of my own; powerful ones; but she knew more about certain things than I did. And though I knew exactly how far I wanted to go with this impending exchange, I didn’t truly have a feel for the limitations she was expecting yet, or of how far I could... encourage her along those lines.

It was like the further I got away from Robert, the more I felt that anything could be possible. Anything at all.

Even the practical equivalent of a magical transformation.

I grinned to myself, covering my mouth with both hands.

It was all so new in my mind. I couldn’t get used to it as being real.

I needed to just get on. Move forward. Get ready.

I had come in my own clothes. There had been no exchange at all as yet. Dahlia was back in her own designer outfits for the journey and this first night. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, though I had an idea she did have her contact lenses on – the ones that were already changing her vision, worsening her ability to focus without them, so that when she put the glasses back on again she really would need them.

It was odd in a way to be wearing my drab outfits, to have my own glasses on, after we’d made the decision to go ahead. I was itching to get on with it. I didn’t know quite what was holding us back. Why couldn’t we jump in with both feet? That was what I wanted to do.

I changed out of my sweaty travel dress and put on a summer dress I’d brought that exposed my arms and chest. It was something I’d bought rashly several years earlier and never worn but it seemed appropriate here, even if it was still dowdy compared to the garments I’d worn during our swaps.

I brushed my hair and put on some shoes; picked up my bag; went to the door.

My nerves were jangling. After I’d pushed too hard before and almost ruined everything I was wary of doing the same again.

But Dahlia really did seem up for anything now. It seemed as though she wanted to go all the way.

Maybe I couldn’t push too hard anymore. Maybe the only risk was that I wouldn’t push hard enough.