Chapter 5: A Giant's Promise
Her gaze held me, a silent conversation happening in the space between her slowing breaths and my own stunned stillness. Her fingers were impossibly warm, a living cage of gentle pressure.
“Okay,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. “Okay. Don’t drop him. Do not drop the tiny man.”
With a deliberateness that felt sacred, she leaned over and lowered me. The landscape of her nightstand rushed up—a vast, pale plain of wood, littered with continental drifts of pens, a titanic hairbrush, a charging cable like a fallen vine. She set me down near the base of a lamp, its bulb a miniature sun. The wood felt cool and solid, a shocking stability after the organic tumult.
I just stood there, dripping, trying to remember how to be a person.
She straightened up, and the scale of her reasserted itself. She looked down at her own clothes, at the blouse still stained from the parking lot sprinklers, and made a face. “Right. Can’t think in this mess.”
Her hands went to the hem of her blouse. From my vantage point, it was like watching a painted sky being peeled away. The fabric whispered overhead, catching on her hair for a moment before it was gone, tossed onto a growing pile on the floor. Next, her bra. The clasp released in the back with a snap that echoed. The garment fell away, and her breasts settled with a soft, heavy motion. The sight was no longer intimate in a sexual way, not from here. It was topographic. A range of smooth, warm-looking hills dusted with the faintest shadows. A mole near her collarbone was a distant, rounded mesa.
She didn’t posture or preen. She just… existed. Large, unselfconscious, real. She nudged her discarded jeans aside with a foot and then crawled onto the bed, the mattress groaning and dipping like a tectonic plate subsiding. She lay back, propped on her elbows, and turned her head towards me. The ceiling fan above her turned with a slow, rhythmic thump-thump-thump, stirring the tendrils of hair on her forehead.
“So,” she said. Her voice was calm, low. It vibrated in the wood under my feet. “Justin. Start from the beginning. What the actual fuck?”
I took a breath. My own voice sounded absurdly thin and reedy to my ears. “I wish I knew. One minute I was walking to my car after a truly shitty day at work. The next, the world… expanded. Or I shrank. The pavement came up to meet me like a rising wall. I thought I was having a stroke. Or dying.”
“But you didn’t die.”
“No. I just got very, very small.”
“And you landed on me.”
“On your… uh. Yeah.”
A slow grin spread across her face. “Lucky shot.”
I managed a weak cough that was supposed to be a laugh. “Lucky. Right.”
“And then I… brought you home.” Her eyes flickered with a memory of the frantic car ride, the rush upstairs, the intense, consuming release. A faint, new blush colored her chest. She didn’t apologize. She just observed it, factually. “You were in there for that.”
“I was… aware. Yes.”
“Huh.” She absorbed that, her gaze thoughtful. “Did it… I mean, from in there… was it…”
“It was like being inside an earthquake,” I said honestly, cutting off her awkward search for words. “A warm, wet earthquake. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced. And before today, I’d sat through a three-hour budget meeting.”
She barked a real laugh, sharp and sudden. The sound shook the nightstand. “Okay. Fair.” Her expression softened into something more curious, more piercing. “You’re taking this weirdly well. For a tiny guy who just got jerked off in.”
“What’s the alternative?” I spread my hands, a tiny gesture of helplessness. “Scream? Cry? I’m one inch tall and currently having a conversation with a giant. Protocol is a little unclear.”
She nodded, accepting the logic. Her eyes traveled over me, not with predatory hunger, but with a dawning, speculative interest. A scientist observing a fascinating new specimen. “You’re not squished. You’re not hurt. Can you get hurt?”
I thought about the fall onto her chest, the crushing pressure, the violent friction. “I don’t think so. Everything feels… intense. Overwhelming. But not damaging. I can breathe, even when there logically shouldn’t be air.”
“Super-tiny, super-durable.” She chewed her lower lip. “That’s handy.”
A silence fell, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of the thump-thump-thump of the fan, the scent of her skin and vanilla, and the enormous weight of our situation.
“I can’t just put you in a shoebox,” she said finally, her voice decisive. “And I’m not mailing you to NASA. So here’s the deal. You stay with me. I’ll keep you safe. From cats, from roombas, from my clumsy ass. We’ll try to figure this out. Google ‘sudden shrinkage.’ See a weird doctor. Whatever.”
“That’s… incredibly kind,” I said, the words feeling inadequate.
“I’m not just kind,” she said, and that playful, mischievous glint returned to her eyes, darker now in the lamplight. “I’m also really, really curious. So my help has a condition.”
I went still. “A condition.”
“Yeah. You’re a once-in-a-lifetime thing, Justin. And I want to… understand the parameters.” She shifted, her body a mountain range rearranging itself. “I’ll help you. But you have to let me explore. Test the limits. Of you. Of this.”
A cold knot formed in my gut, different from the earlier terrors. This was a negotiation. “Explore how?”
Her smile was wide and utterly genuine. “However I want. Starting now.”
Before I could respond, her hand moved. It wasn’t a grab. It was a slow, deliberate approach, a colossal shape blotting out the light. Her fingertips settled on the nightstand on either side of me, a canyon of skin and nail. Her index finger, a massive, smooth pillar, hovered just before me. The scent of her skin—clean salt and that faint floral lotion—was overpowering.
“Stay still,” she whispered.
Her other hand came up. With a coordination that was mesmerizing, she pinched my torso between her thumb and forefinger, lifting me from the wood. She brought me up, up, through the warm, still air, towards her face.
Her lips were immense, full and softly parted. She didn’t open wide. She brought me close, until all I could see was the subtle texture of her lipstick, the damp line where lip met lip.
“Just an experiment,” she breathed, and the warm, moist air from her words washed over me.
Then she pressed me against her mouth.
It was not a kiss between people. It was a total immersion in a new environment. Soft, yielding, slightly sticky pressure. The warmth was profound. She held me there for a long moment, and I felt the subtle movement of her muscles, the living pliancy of her. Then, a new sensation—the tip of her tongue, hot and wet and rough as a cat’s, flicked out and swiped across my legs.
She made a small, considering sound in her throat, a hum that vibrated through my entire world. The taste of her lip gloss, something sweet and synthetic, flooded my senses.
As slowly as she had brought me up, she lowered me away from her face. Her eyes were lit with pure, unadulterated fascination. “You taste like… skin. And rain. Weird.”
She didn’t return me to the nightstand. Instead, she lowered me down the vast plain of her body. Past the striking cliffs of her collarbones, over the smooth, sweeping valleys between her breasts. She let me go, dropping me the last, tiny distance.
I landed in the deep, soft crevasse between her breasts. They pillowed around me, warm and heavy, their weight a constant, gentle embrace. The world became a canyon of soft, breathing flesh, the scent of her skin all-encompassing, the rhythmic thump-thump of her heartbeat a distant, comforting drum.
Her shadow fell over me again. A single fingertip, vast and warm, descended. It didn’t poke or prod. It settled against my back, almost covering me completely, and began to stroke, slowly, from my shoulders down. The motion was hypnotic, overwhelming in its scale and gentleness.
“See?” she murmured, her voice a deep, soothing rumble all around me. “This is okay. We can help each other.”
I had no answer. I was nestled in the most vulnerable, intimate place imaginable, being pet by a goddess. Terror and a bizarre, creeping sense of safety warred within me. Her fingertip moved again, a slow, possessive caress.
“Get some sleep, tiny man,” she whispered. “Tomorrow we start figuring this out.”
Her breathing began to deepen and slow. The stroking finger gradually stilled, coming to rest beside me, a warm, fleshy wall. The fan thumped on. In the dark, perfumed heat, listening to the colossal rhythm of her heart, I realized the profound truth of my new existence.
My fate was no longer my own. It was cupped in her hands, resting between her breasts, subject to her whims, her curiosity, her protection.
I was utterly, irrevocably hers.