CHAPTER 1: A Drunken Kiss Changes Everything

There are exactly three things Hannah knows for certain about her life:

One: Teaching high school literature is both the best and worst decision she's ever made. Best because she genuinely loves watching teenagers discover that Shakespeare was basically writing soap operas. Worst because they keep asking if she's seen the latest TikTok trend, and she has to pretend she knows what they're talking about.

Two: Her younger sister Ellen has the most patient boyfriend in the world, which is saying something considering Ellen's... situation. Hannah tries not to think about Ellen's situation too much.

Three: She should never, ever drink tequila.

Unfortunately, Hannah only remembers the first fact clearly as she stands in front of her bathroom mirror on a Saturday morning, staring at her reflection with the kind of existential dread usually reserved for people who've just realized they sent a very drunk text to their boss.

Except Hannah's problem feels significantly worse than a misplaced text, though she can't quite articulate why.

"No," she whispers to her reflection. "No, no, no, no, no."

Her reflection, unhelpfully, continues to look exactly like someone who made a series of catastrophically bad decisions the night before. Her hair is doing something that defies the laws of physics, her mascara has migrated to somewhere around her cheekbones, and there's what appears to be a stamp on her hand from Marcus's party that reads "BIRTHDAY BOY'S CREW" in smudged purple ink.

There's something else, though. Something wrong that she can't quite name. A strange tingling sensation in her fingertips. A disorientation that feels deeper than a normal hangover. Like she's forgotten something crucial, something that happened between leaving the party and waking up here.

Hannah's phone buzzes on the counter. She doesn't want to look at it. She really, really doesn't want to look at it. She looks at it anyway.

Ellen: Did you do something stupid last night?

The message sends a jolt of anxiety through Hannah's chest, though she's not entirely sure why. Ellen's tone isn't playful. It's urgent. Almost panicked.

Hannah's fingers hover over the keyboard. How does one even begin to answer that question?

Hannah: Define stupid.

Ellen: Hannah. Did you kiss someone?

Hannah's stomach drops. Why does that question feel so loaded? Why does it feel like Ellen is asking about something much more serious than a drunken kiss?

Hannah: ...maybe.

Ellen: HANNAH.

Hannah: In my defense, I was drunk.

Ellen: That's not a defense! That's the OPPOSITE of a defense! Who was it?

Hannah closes her eyes and tries to remember the previous night with anything resembling clarity.

Twenty-Four Hours Earlier

Friday afternoon at Riverside High School always had a particular energy—that desperate, caffeinated buzz of teachers and students alike counting down the minutes until freedom. Hannah stood at the front of her AP Literature classroom, chalk in hand, trying to convince twenty-seven teenagers that Romeo and Juliet was not, in fact, a romance.

"It's a tragedy about two impulsive teenagers who knew each other for three days," Hannah said, writing "FOUR DAYS" on the board in large letters. "Four days. They went from 'hello' to 'married' to 'dead' in less time than it takes most people to decide on a Netflix show."

A hand shot up. "But isn't it romantic that they loved each other so much they died for each other?"

"Is it romantic, or is it a cautionary tale about the dangers of not having a solid communication plan?" Hannah countered. "Juliet literally wakes up five minutes too late. Five minutes! If Romeo had just waited, or if Juliet had left a note that said 'Hey, I'm not actually dead, just taking a really intense nap,' we'd have a very different ending."

The class laughed, and Hannah felt that familiar warm satisfaction of actually connecting with her students. This was why she taught—these moments when literature stopped being something dead on a page and became something alive and relevant.

"So what you're saying," another student said, "is that Romeo and Juliet is basically about bad timing?"

"And poor impulse control," Hannah added. "And family drama. And the fact that sometimes love makes people do incredibly stupid things."

The words hung in the air for a moment, and Hannah felt an uncomfortable prickle of self-awareness. She was literally teaching a lesson about the dangers of impulsive romantic decisions while planning to attend a party where she'd have to actively avoid making impulsive romantic decisions.

The irony was not lost on her.

The bell rang, and students began packing up their bags with the kind of frantic energy that suggested they'd been holding their breath for the last ten minutes.

"Have a good weekend!" Hannah called after them. "And remember—essay on tragic flaws is due Wednesday! No excuses!"

A chorus of groans followed them out the door.

Hannah was erasing the board when Jennifer from the English department poked her head in. "Hey, you're coming to Marcus's party tonight, right?"

"That's the plan," Hannah said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt.

"Good. You need to get out more. You've been weirdly hermit-like lately."

"I'm not hermit-like. I'm just... selective about my social engagements."

Jennifer gave her a look. "You turned down drinks last week because you said you had to 'reorganize your bookshelf by publication date.'"

"It needed to be done."

"Hannah. You're twenty-eight, not eighty-eight. Come to the party. Have fun. Maybe talk to Lee—I saw him looking at you during the staff meeting last week."

Hannah's heart did a stupid little flip at the mention of Lee's name. "He was probably just zoning out in my direction."

"Or," Jennifer said, drawing out the word, "he was looking at you because he thinks you're cute and interesting and he wants to talk to you but he's too shy to make the first move."

"That's a lot of assumptions."

"I'm an English teacher. Making assumptions about subtext is literally my job." Jennifer grinned. "Just come to the party. Worst case scenario, you have a few drinks and go home. Best case scenario, you finally talk to the guy you've been crushing on for six months."

After Jennifer left, Hannah gathered her things and headed toward the main office to check her mailbox. The hallways were mostly empty now, just a few stragglers at lockers and the distant sound of the basketball team practicing in the gym.

She was so focused on mentally preparing herself for the party that she almost walked directly into Sean.

"Oh—sorry!" Hannah stumbled back, her bag sliding off her shoulder.

"No, that was my fault," Sean said, reaching out to steady her. "I wasn't looking where I was going."

Sean. Math teacher. Quiet. Wore glasses that made him look like a particularly thoughtful librarian. Hannah had maybe spoken to him three times in the two years they'd both worked at Riverside, and each conversation had been aggressively mundane—weather, coffee, the eternal mystery of the faculty lounge microwave that only worked on Tuesdays.

"You okay?" Sean asked, and Hannah realized she'd been staring at him for a beat too long.

"Yeah, fine. Just end-of-week brain fog."

"I know the feeling." He smiled, and Hannah noticed for the first time that he had a nice smile. Warm. A little crooked. "You going to Marcus's party tonight?"

"Planning on it. You?"

"Probably for a bit. My brother's staying with me this weekend, so I can't stay too late, but I figured I should make an appearance." He adjusted his glasses in a gesture that seemed nervous. "Maybe I'll see you there?"

"Yeah, maybe," Hannah said, and then Sean was walking away, and she was standing in the hallway wondering why that interaction had felt slightly more significant than their usual exchanges.

She shook it off. She was just nervous about the party. That was all.

By the time Hannah got home, her anxiety had fully kicked in. She stood in front of her closet, staring at her clothes like they might offer some kind of guidance.

The thing about being a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a family curse is that people expect you to act like you have a family curse. They expect brooding, maybe some dramatic staring out of rain-streaked windows, possibly a wardrobe consisting entirely of black clothing.

Hannah, however, has always been more of a "ignore the problem until it goes away" kind of person.

Which is why, when her colleague and friend Marcus invited her to his birthday party, she said yes immediately. Never mind that parties meant people, and people meant potential romantic situations, and romantic situations meant the ever-present risk of accidentally triggering the curse that had plagued the women in her family for four hundred years.

She pulled out three different outfits, held them up, put them back. Too formal. Too casual. Too "I'm trying too hard."

"You're overthinking this," Hannah told herself as she finally settled on dark jeans and a blue top that Ellen had once said made her eyes look nice. "You're just going to have a few drinks, socialize like a normal human being, and absolutely, definitely, under no circumstances kiss anyone."

From the living room, Ellen's voice drifted in: "You know you're talking to yourself again, right?"

Hannah emerged from the bathroom to find her younger sister sprawled on the couch, her boyfriend Braden beside her. They looked disgustingly happy together, the kind of happy that made Hannah want to throw things.

Not because she wasn't happy for Ellen. She was. Genuinely. Ellen had been living with the curse for three years now—transforming into a golden retriever every night from sunset to sunrise—and Braden had stuck with her through all of it. He'd even been the one to break her curse last year, kissing her dog-form after months of building trust and understanding.

It was beautiful. It was romantic. It was also a constant reminder that Hannah was still curse-free only because she'd been avoiding romantic entanglements like they were contagious.

"I'm not talking to myself," Hannah said, grabbing her purse. "I'm giving myself a motivational speech."

"About not kissing anyone?" Ellen raised an eyebrow. "That's a weird thing to need motivation for."

"Some of us," Hannah said pointedly, "would like to avoid turning into a dog every night."

Braden looked up from his phone. "You know, the dog thing isn't that bad once you get used to it."

"You're not the one who was a dog," Ellen said, swatting his arm.

"No, but I was the one who had to explain to my roommate why there was a golden retriever in my bed every morning." Braden grinned. "That was an interesting conversation."

"How did you explain it?" Hannah asked, genuinely curious.

"I told him I was dog-sitting for a friend who worked night shifts. He bought it for about two months before he started asking why the dog never left and why I seemed so emotionally attached to it."

Ellen grinned. "You loved it."

"I did," Braden admitted, pulling her closer. "But I'm also glad you're human full-time now. No offense to dog-Ellen, but human-Ellen is better at conversations."

"And opening doors," Ellen added. "Being a dog with human-level intelligence is incredibly frustrating. Do you know how many times I tried to communicate something important and all that came out was barking?"

Hannah had heard this story before, but it never got less surreal. Ellen had spent three years transforming every night, unable to speak, unable to explain what was happening to her. It was only because Braden had been patient enough, devoted enough, to stick around and eventually figure it out that Ellen was free now.

Hannah wasn't sure she could ask that of anyone. Hell, she wasn't sure anyone would be willing to give it.

"Okay, I'm leaving before you two get any more adorable," Hannah said, checking her reflection one more time in the hallway mirror. "It's physically painful to watch."

"Wait." Ellen sat up, suddenly serious. "Hannah, I mean it. Be careful tonight. You know how the curse works. One kiss, and—"

"And I turn into a dog every night until the same person kisses me again while I'm in dog form. I know, Ellen. I've known since I was twelve and Mom sat us down for the most awkward puberty talk in human history."

That conversation had been seared into Hannah's memory. Their mother, sitting them both down at the kitchen table with the kind of grave expression usually reserved for terminal diagnoses, explaining that the women in their family had been cursed for four hundred years. One kiss—just one—would trigger a transformation. Every night from sunset to sunrise, they'd become dogs. The only way to break it was for the same person to kiss them again while in dog form.

"It's not fair," their mother had said, her voice tight with old anger. "It's never been fair. But it's real, and you need to be careful."

Hannah had spent her teenage years being so careful she'd never even had a first kiss. She'd watched her friends date and experiment and make mistakes, and she'd stayed on the sidelines, terrified of triggering something she couldn't undo.

Ellen had been braver. Or maybe just more optimistic. She'd dated, carefully, and when the curse finally triggered at twenty-three, she'd faced it head-on.

Hannah wasn't sure she had that kind of courage.

"I'm just saying," Ellen continued, pulling Hannah back to the present, "tequila makes people do stupid things."

"I'm not going to drink tequila."

Ellen gave her a look that said she knew exactly how much Hannah's promises were worth.

"Fine, I'll limit myself to two drinks. Three, tops. And I'll stay away from anyone remotely kissable."

"Everyone is remotely kissable when you're drunk enough," Braden offered helpfully.

Hannah pointed at him. "You're not helping."

"Just trying to provide a realistic perspective."

"Well, stop it." Hannah grabbed her keys and headed for the door. "I'm going to be fine. I'm going to go to this party, have a nice time, and come home completely curse-free. Watch me."

Ellen and Braden exchanged a look that Hannah pretended not to see.

"Text me when you get there," Ellen called after her. "And when you leave. And if anything weird happens."

"Nothing weird is going to happen!"

Hannah believed this right up until she walked into Marcus's apartment and saw Lee standing by the window, and her entire careful plan began to crumble.

Hannah did not, in retrospect, watch herself nearly carefully enough.

The party was exactly what she expected: too many people crammed into Marcus's apartment, music too loud for actual conversation, and a drinks table that seemed to refill itself through some kind of alcohol-based magic. The air was thick with competing perfumes and colognes, and someone had strung up fairy lights that gave everything a soft, slightly surreal glow.

Marcus greeted her at the door with a hug that lifted her slightly off the ground. "Hannah! You came! I was worried you'd bail."

"Why would I bail on your birthday?"

"Because you've bailed on the last three social events I invited you to?"

"Those were different. Those were... weeknight things."

"One of them was a Saturday brunch."

"I had papers to grade."

Marcus gave her a knowing look but didn't push it. "Well, you're here now. Drinks are in the kitchen, food is wherever you can find space for a plate, and I think half the school is here, so prepare for aggressive small talk."

He wasn't exaggerating. Hannah recognized at least a dozen colleagues scattered throughout the apartment. Jennifer was holding court near the drinks table, Paul from administration was attempting to DJ from his phone, and there was a cluster of PE teachers doing something that looked suspiciously like the beginning of a drinking game.

Hannah grabbed a beer from the kitchen—just one, she told herself, she'd nurse it all night—and made her way through the crowd. She talked about lesson plans with Jennifer, debated the merits of various coffee shops with Paul, and successfully avoided the drinks table for a solid forty-five minutes.

She was actually starting to relax, to think that maybe she could do this—just be a normal person at a normal party—when she saw him.

Lee. History teacher. Objectively attractive. Subjectively the subject of Hannah's quiet, harmless crush for the past six months.

He was standing by the window, laughing at something someone said, and the light caught his face in a way that made Hannah's chest do a stupid little flip. He was wearing a dark green button-down that brought out his eyes, and his hair was slightly messy in that way that looked effortless but probably wasn't.

Hannah had been nursing a crush on Lee since the first staff meeting of the school year, when he'd made a joke about the school's new "synergistic learning initiatives" that had made her snort-laugh into her coffee. They'd had a handful of conversations since then—brief exchanges in the hallway, a longer discussion about historical fiction in the faculty lounge—but nothing that could be classified as actual flirting.

Hannah wasn't even sure Lee knew she existed beyond "that English teacher who's always carrying too many books."

"Oh no," she muttered into her beer.

"Oh no, what?" Marcus appeared at her elbow, already three drinks ahead of her based on the flush in his cheeks and the volume of his voice.

"Nothing. Just... is Lee seeing anyone?"

Marcus's eyes lit up with the unholy glee of a matchmaker sensing opportunity. "No! You should totally talk to him. He's a great guy. Very smart. Loves dogs."

Hannah's stomach dropped. "Dogs?"

"Yeah, he volunteers at the animal shelter on weekends. It's adorable. He's got like a dozen photos on his Instagram of him with puppies. Why, do you not like dogs?"

"No, I like dogs. Dogs are great. Dogs are... fine."

They were not fine. Dogs were a complication Hannah couldn't afford to think about. If she triggered the curse and Lee was the one who had to break it, the fact that he loved dogs might actually be helpful. But thinking about that felt like tempting fate.

"You should go talk to him," Marcus said, already pushing her forward with a hand on her back.

"I shouldn't—"

"Hannah, you've been staring at him for months. Just go say hi. What's the worst that could happen?"

Hannah could think of several things, actually, but Marcus was already propelling her across the room, and then she was standing in front of Lee, and he was smiling at her, and her brain turned into static.

"Hannah! Hey!" Lee said, and oh god, he knew her name. He said it like he was genuinely happy to see her. "I was hoping you'd be here."

He was hoping she'd be here. Hannah's brain tried to process this information and failed spectacularly.

"You were?" she managed, her voice coming out slightly higher than normal.

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you about that Shakespeare unit you did last semester. I heard the students loved it."

They talked. Actually talked. Lee asked about her teaching philosophy, and Hannah found herself relaxing into the conversation, her usual wit returning. She told him about her "Shakespeare is soap operas" approach, and he laughed—actually laughed, not the polite chuckle people give when they're just being nice.

"That's brilliant," Lee said. "I try to do something similar with history—make it feel relevant instead of just dates and dead people. Last week I had my students create TikToks about the French Revolution."

"How did that go?"

"Let's just say I now know way more about guillotine memes than I ever wanted to."

Hannah laughed, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, someone handed her another drink. She didn't remember finishing her first beer, but apparently she had, because now she was holding something that tasted like vodka and cranberry juice and was going down way too easily.

The party got louder. The music shifted to something with a heavier beat. More people crowded into the space, and Hannah found herself standing closer to Lee, close enough that she could smell his cologne—something woodsy and clean.

"I should get some air," Hannah said eventually, her head spinning pleasantly. The apartment had gotten warm, and she was acutely aware of how close Lee was standing, how easy it would be to just lean forward and—

No. No, she was not going to think about that.

"Want company?" Lee asked, and the way he said it—hopeful, a little nervous—made Hannah's heart skip.

Yes. Yes, she absolutely wanted company. She wanted company so badly it was probably visible from space.

"Sure," she said, trying to sound casual and probably failing.

They made their way through the crowded apartment and down the stairs. Marcus's place was on the second floor of an old brownstone, and when they stepped outside, the cool night air hit Hannah's face like a blessing. She took a deep breath, trying to clear her head.

"This is nice," Lee said, standing beside her on the sidewalk. The street was quiet, most of the neighborhood already asleep despite the party going on above them. A streetlight cast a warm glow over the pavement, and somewhere in the distance, Hannah could hear the sound of traffic.

"Yeah," Hannah agreed. She was acutely aware of how close Lee was standing, how their shoulders almost touched. She could feel the warmth radiating from him, could see the way the streetlight reflected in his eyes.

This was fine. This was totally fine. She was just standing next to an attractive man on a sidewalk under the stars. Nothing was going to happen. She was in complete control.

Except she wasn't, because she'd had three drinks—or was it four?—and Lee was looking at her with an expression that made her stomach flip, and the night felt full of possibility in a way that was both thrilling and terrifying.

"Hannah," Lee said, turning to face her. "I've been wanting to tell you something."

Her heart hammered. "Yeah?"

"I really like—"

Whatever Lee really liked, Hannah never found out, because at that exact moment, she saw someone coming around the corner. Dark hair. Same height as Lee. Same build. In her tequila-addled brain, Hannah thought: Oh, there's Lee.

Which made no sense, because Lee was standing right in front of her, but drunk logic doesn't follow the same rules as sober logic.

The person—Sean, though Hannah didn't know that yet—looked startled to see them. He'd probably just stepped out for air himself, or maybe he was leaving the party early. He opened his mouth to say something.

Hannah, operating on pure liquid courage and zero common sense, lurched forward and kissed him.

For one perfect, horrible second, Hannah's brain registered several things simultaneously:

One: She was kissing someone.

Two: This person tasted different than she'd imagined Lee would taste.

Three: This person had gone completely rigid with shock.

Four: She had just triggered a four-hundred-year-old family curse.

Five: She was going to turn into a dog at sunset.

Six: Tequila was a mistake.

The kiss lasted maybe two seconds—barely long enough to count as a kiss at all—but it was enough. Hannah felt it the moment it happened, a strange tingling sensation that started at her lips and spread through her entire body. It wasn't painful, exactly, but it was unmistakable. Like electricity running under her skin. The curse activating. Locking into place.

She pulled back, eyes wide with horror, and saw the person's face clearly for the first time.

Not Lee.

Definitely not Lee.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean—I thought you were—I have to go—"

Hannah fled before anyone could respond. She heard Lee calling her name behind her, heard the other man—Sean, her brain supplied helpfully, that's Sean from the math department—saying "Wait, what just—" but she didn't stop. She couldn't stop.

She ran around the corner into a narrow alley between buildings, her heart pounding, her whole body still tingling with that strange electric sensation. She pressed her back against the brick wall, trying to catch her breath, trying to process what had just happened.

She'd kissed the wrong person. She'd kissed Sean. Math teacher Sean. The guy she'd literally run into in the hallway that afternoon. And now he was the only person in the entire world who could break her curse.

Behind her, she heard footsteps. Sean had followed her around the corner.

"Hey, are you okay?" His voice was concerned, confused. "I don't know what just happened, but—"

He stopped mid-sentence.

Hannah tried to turn around, tried to explain, tried to apologize, but something was wrong. Her body felt strange. The tingling sensation was spreading, intensifying. Her vision blurred. The world tilted sideways.

And then everything changed.

Sean stood frozen at the entrance to the alley, staring at the spot where Hannah had been standing just seconds ago. But Hannah wasn't there anymore.

Instead, there was a golden retriever.

The dog looked up at him with wide, confused eyes. It—she—took a tentative step forward, and Sean's entire body locked up.

Dog.

There was a dog.

A dog in the alley where a woman had just been standing.

Sean's breath came in short, sharp gasps. His heart was racing. His hands were shaking. Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to run, to get away, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the animal in front of him.

The dog whined softly, taking another step toward him.

Sean backed away, his shoulder hitting the brick wall. "No," he whispered. "No, no, no."

The dog—the golden retriever with those strangely human eyes—sat down. She tilted her head, watching him with an expression that looked almost... confused. Scared.

But Sean couldn't process that. Couldn't process anything except the overwhelming terror flooding his system. His therapist's breathing exercises were completely forgotten. All the progress he'd made, all the exposure therapy, all of it vanished in the face of an actual dog, right there, less than ten feet away.

"Where did you—" Sean's voice cracked. "Where did she go? The woman who was just—"

The dog whined again. She stood up, took another step forward.

Sean pressed himself harder against the wall. "Stay back. Please. Just—stay back."

But the dog didn't understand. She just looked at him with those wide, frightened eyes, and somewhere in the back of Sean's panic-stricken mind, a small voice whispered that something was very, very wrong about this situation.

A woman had run into this alley. He'd followed her. And now there was only a dog.

But that was impossible. That didn't make sense. People didn't just disappear and get replaced by dogs.

Sean's vision was starting to blur at the edges. He was going to have a panic attack. Right here, in an alley, in front of a dog that had somehow appeared out of nowhere.

The dog took another step forward, and Sean finally found the strength to move. He turned and ran back toward the street, his heart pounding so hard he thought it might burst.

Behind him, the golden retriever sat down in the alley, alone and confused, not yet understanding what had just happened to her body, or why the man she'd accidentally kissed had looked at her with such absolute terror.

Hannah doesn't remember how she got back to her apartment. There's a gap in her memory—a blur of running, of panic, of her body doing things that didn't make sense. But somehow, she's in her bedroom now, the door locked behind her, her heart still racing.

In her apartment, Hannah felt the first wave of pain.

It starts in her hands. The tingling spreads up her arms, and she stumbles backward, suddenly dizzy. The room tilts. Her vision blurs and then sharpens in a way that feels wrong—colors seem brighter, more vivid, but also somehow less distinct. She can't quite explain it.

"What's happening?" she whispers.

Her hands—her hands are changing. The skin is darkening, shifting. She holds them up to the light, watching in horror as her fingers seem to blur together, as fur begins to sprout along her knuckles.

"No. No, no, no—"

The pain hits her like a wave. Not sharp, exactly, but deep and pervasive, like every bone in her body is rearranging itself. She falls to her knees, gasping, trying to understand what's happening. This isn't possible. This isn't real. She's having some kind of breakdown, some kind of stress-induced hallucination brought on by too much tequila and too much panic about kissing the wrong person.

But it feels real.

Everything feels real.

Her spine curves. Her legs buckle beneath her in a way that should be impossible. She tries to scream, but the sound that comes out is wrong—higher pitched, more desperate. She watches, unable to stop it, as her body continues to transform. Her clothes hang loose around her now-smaller frame. Her vision shifts again, the world becoming a riot of scents and sounds that her human brain can't quite process.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the pain stops.

Hannah—or what used to be Hannah—stands on four legs in the middle of her bedroom, breathing hard, her heart pounding in her chest. She looks down at her paws. Her brown paws. She tries to speak, to call for help, but all that comes out is a confused, terrified whimper.

She's a dog.

She's actually a dog.

The realization hits her like a second wave of panic, and she bolts from the bedroom, running in circles through her apartment, trying to understand what's happening, trying to find some way to reverse it. But nothing works. She's still a dog. She's still four-legged and furry and completely, utterly unable to explain any of this to anyone.

She collapses on her couch—or tries to; she ends up on the floor instead, her new body not quite cooperating with her human instincts—and waits for morning, for sunrise, for something to change.

She doesn't sleep. She can't sleep. She just lies there in the dark, a dog in a human's apartment, waiting for an explanation that never comes.