Chapter 1: The Shrinking Designer and the Oblivious CEO
The elevator doors sighed shut, sealing Elliot Finch in a mirrored tomb with his boss. He stared straight ahead at his own reflection, trying to ignore the other man’s presence. It wasn’t working.
Jasper Sterling stood beside him, scrolling through his phone, a faint, focused frown on his face. He smelled like expensive sandalwood and crisp cotton. Elliot had been six-foot-two when he’d left his apartment this morning. He knew this because he’d measured himself. Again. Now, in the warped reflection of the polished steel, the top of his own head appeared to be level with Jasper’s eyebrows.
Three inches. He’d lost three damn inches in the elevator shaft between floors fourteen and twenty-two. A cold, familiar dread pooled in his stomach, a sensation like melting from the inside out. It had been the way Jasper had grinned at him in the lobby, all easy confidence and blinding white teeth, and said, “Ready to blow them away, Finch?” The jolt of pure, unadulterated affection had hit Elliot like a low-grade fever, and his body had decided to express it by quietly consuming a portion of his skeleton.
“You good?” Jasper’s voice cut through the hum of the elevator.
Elliot jumped. “Great. Peachy. Why?”
“You’re breathing like you just ran a marathon.”
“Just… enthusiastic about the presentation.” Elliot’s voice didn’t crack, thankfully. It was one of the few things that stayed consistent. He could be the size of a tissue box and still sound like himself. A small, bitter mercy.
The doors opened into the sleek, air-conditioned hush of the executive floor. Sterling Innovations was all glass, steel, and muted greys, a monument to minimalism that made Elliot feel constantly like he was leaving smudges. The conference room for the Vektor pitch was the worst of it—a long, glacial slab of white oak under brutalist lighting, the entire city skyline sprawled behind floor-to-ceiling windows like a neon painting.
Elliot set up his laptop, his fingers clumsy. He could feel the drag of his suit jacket on his shoulders, now slightly too broad for the frame inside it. His trousers felt loose at the waist. He’d have to belt them tighter at the first chance.
Jasper strode in, shedding his tailored jacket and draping it over a chair. At twenty-two, he moved with a born CEO’s unconscious ownership of space. He rolled up the sleeves of his pale blue shirt, revealing toned forearms. Elliot looked away, feeling a hot prickle at the nape of his neck. Don’t. Do not.
“Alright, let’s see the final hero shot before they get here,” Jasper said, coming around the table.
He leaned over Elliot’s shoulder to see the screen. Suddenly, the scent of sandalwood was overwhelming. Elliot could feel the heat radiating from Jasper’s body, could see the individual threads of his shirt cuff. His pulse, traitorous and loud, began to hammer in his ears. A faint, fizzy tingling started in his toes, a sensation like carbonation in his veins.
No. Not now.
“The typography is sharp,” Jasper murmured, his voice close to Elliot’s ear. He reached past, his hand brushing Elliot’s as he took control of the trackpad. “But this gradient here feels a bit safe. What if we pushed it? Made it more… electric?”
His fingers moved, quick and sure. Elliot tried to focus on the screen, on the vectors and pixels, but his entire awareness had narrowed to the point of contact where Jasper’s skin had touched his. The tingling spread up his calves. He felt a subtle, unsettling shift in his center of gravity, a gentle internal collapse.
He was shrinking. Again. Right here, right now.
He lurched to his feet, the chair screeching on the polished concrete floor. “Bathroom,” he choked out. “Back in a sec.”
Jasper straightened up, his blue eyes confused. “The clients are due in five.”
“It’ll be two! Promise!” Elliot’s voice was too high. He was definitely shorter. He could see more of the window’s top frame than he could thirty seconds ago.
He half-walked, half-jogged to the restroom, a sanctuary of cool white tile. Locking himself in a stall, he braced his hands against the door and let out a shuddering breath. He looked down at his shoes. They seemed the same. But his perception was off. He felt insubstantial, like a suit of clothes hung on a rickety frame.
This was his life. A graphic designer with a decent portfolio and a catastrophic, humiliating secret. Extreme emotion—specifically the dizzying, hopeless cocktail of longing and anxiety stirred up by Jasper Sterling—triggered a physical regression. His height, his hair color, even his bone structure could shift in a wave of biochemical panic. He’d once woken up with blonde hair after a dream about Jasper laughing at one of his jokes. He’d spent a week working from home.
The door to the restroom swung open. Elliot froze.
“Elliot?” It was Jasper. Of course it was.
“Occupied!”
“I know. Listen, are you okay? You look… pale.” A pause. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine. Just… pre-presentation nerves.”
“You don’t get nerves. You mocked up the entire Norden rebrand while you had food poisoning.” Jasper’s tone was closer now. He was leaning against the sinks, Elliot could picture it.
“New kind of nerves,” Elliot said, staring desperately at the stall door. The tingling was fading, the shrinkage stabilising. He estimated he was down another inch, maybe two. He was now officially looking up at Jasper from a perspective he hadn’t had since high school.
“Well, get them out of your system. The Vektor guys just walked in. They brought bagels. And Andrew Vektor himself. He’s a legend, and he’s looking at your work. So pull it together.”
There was no pity in Jasper’s voice, only a blunt, genuine faith. That was the worst part. He believed in Elliot’s talent utterly, while Elliot was literally falling apart because of him.
“Right. Be out in ten seconds.”
He heard the door swing shut. Elliot unlocked the stall and faced the mirror. The changes were subtle to an outsider, he told himself. Just a guy who looked a bit tired, a bit more slender. His brown hair seemed a shade lighter at the roots. His eyes, a boring hazel, looked too big for his face. He adjusted his belt, pulling it two notches tighter. He squared his shoulders, a pointless gesture.
When he walked back into the conference room, four men in dark sweaters and glasses were milling around the bagel spread. Jasper was in the thick of it, shaking hands, his laugh easy and infectious.
“Ah, here’s our design genius now,” Jasper announced, waving Elliot over. “Elliot Finch, the mind behind the visuals. Elliot, this is Andrew Vektor.”
A man in his fifties with sharp eyes turned and extended a hand. Elliot took it. His own hand felt small in the man’s grip.
“Big fan of your early campaign for Aether,” Vektor said, his gaze assessing. “Bold. Unapologetic.”
“Thank you,” Elliot said, forcing his voice into a lower register. “That means a lot.”
The presentation began. Elliot clicked through his slides, his explanation of color theory and user interface flowing on autopilot, even as he was acutely aware of Jasper, leaning against the window wall, nodding along. Every approving glance was a spike of heat; every time Jasper stepped in to elaborate on a business point, Elliot felt a corresponding cold shrink in his joints.
He was riding a razor’s edge, trying to pilot a professional presentation while manually suppressing a biological meltdown.
It was during the Q&A that it happened. Andrew Vektor pointed a laser pen at a dashboard design. “The data visualization here is clean. But is it distinctive? I see this style everywhere now.”
Jasper pushed off the wall and came to stand beside Elliot, too close again. He put a hand lightly on Elliot’s lower back. A gesture of solidarity, of partnership.
“Elliot’s initial concepts were far more radical,” Jasper said, his hand a burning brand through the fabric of Elliot’s shirt. “I reined him in. Told him to walk you into the weird, not shove you.”
He squeezed Elliot’s side, a quick, comradely squeeze.
The effect was instant and catastrophic. It wasn’t a tingle this time. It was a plunge. Elliot’s vision swam. The room seemed to surge upwards, the ceiling rushing away. Jasper’s hand, resting on his back, now felt like it was spanning half his torso. The polished tabletop loomed like a cliff edge. He heard his own voice, thin and far away, finishing an answer.
He had to get out. Now.
“—so the foundational modularity allows for that evolution,” he heard himself say. He took a jerky step back, dislodging Jasper’s hand. “If you’ll excuse me for just one moment. Please, continue.”
He didn’t run. Walking felt like wading through wet cement, each step oddly proportioned. He felt the eyes on him, confusion radiating from the clients. He saw Jasper’s brows draw together, not in anger, but in genuine, perplexed concern.
Elliot made it to the hall, to a small alcove housing a glowing water cooler. He braced himself against the wall, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He looked at his hands. They were smaller. His shirt cuffs hung past his knuckles. He had shrunk, visibly, significantly, in the middle of the biggest pitch of his career.
He heard the conference room door open, the murmur of polite conversation. The meeting was ending prematurely.
Soft footsteps approached on the engineered hardwood. Jasper stood there, alone, his jacket hooked over a finger. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just looked at Elliot, his sharp blue eyes missing nothing: the too-long sleeves, the panic barely held in check, the sheer physical wrongness of his usually reliable designer.
“Elliot,” he said finally, his voice quiet, stripped of its usual buoyant confidence. “What is going on with you?”
The question hung in the sterile air. There was no accusation in it. Just a deep, unsettling curiosity, and beneath that, the first faint tremor of a trust beginning to fracture. Elliot opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The truth was a monstrous thing, coiled in his throat. The city’s neon glow bled through the windows, painting them both in cold, artificial light, highlighting the newfound, terrifying space between them.