Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

Park couldn’t quite decide what about his newly borrowed flesh had the entire ER playing statue.

He wasn’t some viral heartthrob, surely, nor, was he some scandal-plagued celebrity whose mugshot had outearned his last three projects. At least, the fragments of memory still swirling in his skull — the ones that had survived the shove through the keyhole, anyway — insisted on none of those things.

The boy whose body he’d inherited had been like him, he was sure of that much. A nobody, a reacher and a reader of lines in bathroom mirrors, rich background, sure, but he faced the same demons and the poor Park from another life who’d just died

The two of them had shared too many identical bruises for it to be coincidence.

And yet.

Eyes followed him now the way crows follow fresh roadkill sharp, hungry, unwilling to look away.

Two beds down, the hot little nurse had forgotten the syringe in her hand entirely, her sharp eyes gone soft and slightly glassy as they tracked the line of his shoulders while the one beside him was worse; she pointed the way to the bathroom with the dazed expression like she had just remembered she possessed a pulse, her finger hovering in mid-air like the direction itself had become secondary to the view.

Park felt the corner of his mouth twitch.

’Well, well. The universe really does have a sense of humor. Give a man a face that used to get him hated on sight and suddenly the same face makes syringes forget their purpose.’

His gaze lingered a fraction longer on the first nurse, her uniform still fought a losing battle at the waist while her lips parted just slightly as if she’d forgotten how breathing worked.

He offered them both a small, devastating smile that had never worked in his old life and now felt almost unfair and then started walking.

The stares followed him like shadows with better lighting.

He gave a small, far-too-graceful shrug — the muscles obeyed him with an ease his old shoulders had never managed — and made for the bathroom.

The door of the stall clicked shut behind him and the lock turned; the world, mercifully, narrowed.

He attended to the urgent diplomatic mission with the focused dignity like it had been waiting a long time for the appointment.

And then the second shock of the morning arrived.

’Well. Hello there, old friend.’

His eyes widened at the generous weight in his hand, blinking down at the inventory the universe had apparently included in his compensation package.

’Still big and heavy as usual. Thick. Proud. Darling, if the ladies in this world knew what just woke up in this world, they’d be lining up with contracts in one hand and restraining orders in the other.’

A low, wicked chuckle escaped him as he finished.

’Even death,’ he murmured to no one in particular, ’couldn’t kill the playboy.’

He zipped up. Washed his hands at the small chipped sink and turned to the mirror.

And froze.

For a long moment, nothing in his face moved at all.

’Ah.’

The word came out softly. Reverently. The way he might step into a cathedral he hadn’t known was on the map.

’...There it is.’

The face looking back at him was his own.

The same face he had stared down in cracked bathroom mirrors for years — same black hair falling careless across the brow, same cognac-gold eyes with that faint impossible pink caught in the iris like a wound someone had forgotten to close, same lips that had spent two decades arranging themselves into smiles no one stopped to admire.

His face had not changed, it had simply been taken care of.

Years of unpaid heating bills had been washed out of the skin overnight, the hollow beneath the cheekbone that had always sharpened too far under fluorescent lights and made him look hungry in headshots, had been quietly filled in. The dark scribble of sleepless nights under the eyes was gone, replaced with the soft polished shadow of a man who slept somewhere warm and was woken by sunlight rather than landlords.

His hair that he had always cut himself with kitchen scissors now fell in the careless dark waves of a man who paid someone a lot of money to make it look as though he hadn’t.

The jaw was the same jaw. It had only learned, in this life, to be photographed.

Park leaned closer to the glass, until his breath fogged a small soft circle on it and his own too-gold eyes were inches from the reflection’s. The faint pink in the irises caught the bathroom light and threw it back as something almost rose-coloured. He had spent his whole previous life apologising for those eyes — no, sir, I’m not wearing contacts, sir, yes, sir, they are unusual, sir — and here, on this side of the bumper, the same eyes apparently belonged to a man other men called him sir.

The curse!

The exact curse he had always lived under, only here it had been invested in.

’Look at you, you beautiful bastard.’

He leaned in closer.

’One smile and hearts would shatter louder than my skull on that pavement. I could whisper sweet nothings to a nun and have her reconsidering her vows before the amen.’

He smiled, experimentally, just to test the theory.

The smile landed.

That, more than anything else, was what made him look away from the mirror — his own old face had been capable of that smile his whole life, he knew it had, and the universe had simply never bothered to install an audience. He had practised that exact expression, tilted his chin just so and lowered the lashes. Watched the man in the mirror promise things the man in the mirror would never get to deliver, because no casting room had ever paused long enough to notice.

His smile had been ready it was just the world that had been busy.

Now the smile landed, and the bathroom tiles felt suddenly warmer, and Park, who had spent years pointing a loaded gun at no one in particular, had the obscene feeling that this body had spent its years pointing the same gun and had been heard.

The same face. Two lives. Wildly different invoices.