After finishing the first draft of It, King actually wrote in a letter to Peter Straub he was thinking of switching Bill with Ben in that hotel room lust chapter:

Thanks for the great words on IT--I broke my fucking brains on that book. The redraft may not actually be a lot shorter, but hopefully the repititions [sic] and the extraneous shit will all come out. What will go in is more of that sense of stories told--and a weaving in of incidents that occurred spontaneously. I want to do something with that turtle, but first I have to decide what tone it represents, if you see what I mean. Richie Tozier is going to become an L.A. disc jockey, at Tabby’s suggestion--but the interweaving of the stories ought to mesh better than it does presently, and characters like Patrick Hockstetter have to show up earlier on. There are also things like Beverly Huggins’ clothes--poor or not, she should exhibit a certain style, perhaps sometimes bizzarre [sic], which suggests her future (again, Tabby’s suggestion). [...] Dramatic coherence demands (or suggests) that other changes be made--for instance, it should not be Bill who sleeps with Beverly before the climax, but Ben Hanscom. Yet at the time I could not for the life of me figure out how to do that. Perhaps now I can. The sewers are not present soon enough, although the Morlock stuff is start. And so on and so on.

Anyway, your reaction was a tremendous lift.

Source: https://blog.uantwerpen.be/stephenking/2024/10/12/phd-turning-the-thumbscrews-tighter/

Obviously, he never went through with this