Then I felt something sharp pricking the skin on my shoulder, right where Molly was leaning on me. And it started to hurt more with each passing second. I opened my eyes - keeping them shut wasn't doing any good at this point - and turned to look. The pointy stone claws sticking out of the tips of her altered fingers... they were digging into my skin. And the more I involuntarily squirmed in her unbreakable grip, the more my soft, vulnerable flesh pressed against those sharp points. Before I could try to calm myself down and stop moving, I saw a trickle of red dripping down from my shoulder. Then, right before my eyes, the blood changed color - from dark red to a dull gray.
And it wasn't just the blood, either - the skin of my shoulder was losing its color, too, starting from the spot where Molly was clinging to it and slowly spreading outward. I was becoming the very same gray color that Molly was currently covered in from head to toe. I felt my blood run cold - figuratively as well as literally - as I watched myself begin to change. Carefully, I poked my shoulder with a finger from my other hand, and felt hard, unyielding stone instead of skin. And on the other side of that touch, I could feel a tapping that echoed through me, as if that finger was sticking right past my skin and hitting bone. I shuddered from the incredible sensitivity of my changing skin - and from the realization that I was about to become another statue!
In a blaze of panic, my first thought was to run, get as far away from the source of the contagion (no matter how much I loved her) and hope the stone texture would stop spreading across my skin. But even though most of my muscles could still move, I was locked in place by Molly's heavy frame, leaning against me and pressing me down. It was hard enough for me to hold up her greatly increased weight as I stood there, but my own upper body was growing heavier and heavier as the gray reached the middle of my chest. My legs wobbled under the strain, threatening to make us both fall over. It was almost a relief - almost - to watch the stone sweep quickly down my torso and start to firm up my aching thighs. Now I couldn't even feel the weight my body was forced to hold up. And I couldn't buckle under the pressure even if I wanted to, my bare gray feet stuck firmly against the floor.
There was nothing I could do now but watch it happen. I couldn't see what was happening to my skin underneath my clothes, which were not turning into stone like everything else. I numbly realized how ridiculous it was going to look, if anybody saw a statue wearing a T-shirt and khakis. I waited for the dramatic gargoyle changes that had afflicted Molly last night - the claws, the scales, the wings bursting through the back of my shirt and perhaps pushing Molly's frozen form away from me. But they weren't coming. I was most of the way to being a statue of an ordinary human man, which was both existentially terrifying and a little bit of a letdown.
In a matter of seconds, all that was left to move freely was my head and my arms. I wondered if I should try to strike a dignified pose, but that seemed like the last thing I should be concerned about right now. The shoulder that was under Molly's grip already kept that arm from moving very much, while my other arm instinctually stretched out into the air in front of me, as if there was some antidote to this curse that sat just out of my reach. I watched the gray rocky surface traveling up the length of that arm, making it harder and harder to move the still-fleshy part of it with every inch. My elbow froze in place, and then all I could bend was my wrist. My forearm surrendered, bit by bit, to the change. At the last second, I bent my outstretched fingers down, trying to prove to myself that I still could. And I could, but I couldn't stretch them back out again.
I was frozen from head to toe. No matter how much I willed myself to move, to struggle against my invisible restraints, nothing happened. There was no mirror that I could see myself in, but I knew that my mouth was gaping open in horror. I couldn't close it, or even shift the uncomfortable position of my tongue against my teeth. I felt the warm, humid air hang lazily deep down in my throat, with no lungs to breathe it in or out. It was a sharp contrast to the cold that ran through my new stone form. Suddenly my skin was the warmest part of me, exposed to the air, while the places where my hot pumping blood vessels should be felt like ice. Now I knew how Molly must have felt.
And as the last bits of my uncovered flesh went gray, that thought turned my attention back to my equally helpless girlfriend. I couldn't actually turn to look at her now, but I could still feel her claws on me. They still dug into my shoulder, the skin curving underneath them as if I was still made of soft flesh. If she could somehow be pulled off of me, I would still have the indents of her fingers pressed into my smooth stone surface.
I thought about Molly's curse. As a gargoyle, apparently, she couldn't move if a human saw her or was touching her. But I was no longer a living human being. Could she move now? Or was she still trapped in place, because I could still see and feel her? And did the same rules apply to me? Would I be free to move, from now on, as long as no one saw me doing it? I hoped against hope that, because we were both fully stone, we wouldn't force each other to freeze up with just a look. But if I was stopping her from moving, and she was stopping me... then the two of us were going to be stuck this way for a long time. Well, now that my changes were finally finished, there was no human left in the room. I started trying to flex my arm, watching for any sign that it was working.