Chapter 6: Boxed In
The darkness wasn’t unconsciousness. It was a suffocating sense of scale. Herc came back to himself wrapped in a blanket that felt like a field of coarse wool, the fibers as thick as ropes. He was on the sofa, but it was no longer a piece of furniture—it was a vast, textured plain.
And Ro was a mountain range beside him.
She was asleep, her breath a slow, seismic rhythm. He pushed himself up, the blanket sliding off. He was naked. His clothes had become lost in the transition. He looked at his body. The landscape of him was softer, younger. The definition he’d worked for, mourned for, was a memory. He was slight. Delicate.
He looked at her. Truly looked.
She’d grown. Not just taller, but denser, more monumental. The sofa, a large sectional, was now too small for her. Her feet, still socked, hung over the far armrest. One of her hands, palm up and relaxed, lay on the cushion near him. He placed his own hand in the center of her palm. His entire hand, wrist to fingertips, fit within the lines of her life and heart and head. He was a figurine in a giant’s grasp.
A sound caught in his throat.
Her eyes opened. They found him immediately, those deep brown pools, now the size of saucers. She blinked, awareness flooding in, followed by a heartbreak so profound it seemed to change the air pressure.
“Herc.”
“Still here,” he whispered. His voice was higher. Lighter. It horrified him.
She slowly curled her fingers, enveloping his hand in a gentle, inescapable cage. “The dive… it stopped. You passed out. I thought…” She didn’t finish.
“What’s the damage?”
She sat up, the movement causing the entire sofa to groan and shift. The scale adjustment was dizzying. Sitting, she was taller than he was standing. Her sweatpants were ripped at the seams along her thighs. Her t-shirt, already tight before, was a second skin, the neckline straining across the broad shelf of her chest. When she breathed, the fabric whined.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we need to find you something to wear. Your things are in that box.” She nodded toward a cardboard box that looked like a shipping crate. It was the duffel bag, contents hastily dumped.
He walked across the cushion, the journey taking several steps, and peered over the edge of the sofa to the floor. The drop was now about four times his height. A cliff face of striped fabric and hardwood below.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
“Yeah.” She leaned over, her shadow engulfing him. “Here.”
Before he could protest, her hands encircled his ribs. Her touch was phenomenally careful, but the sheer coverage was absolute. She lifted him as easily as picking up a teacup and set him down on the floor beside the box. The world tilted. The floorboards were vast, unvarnished plains. Dust motes danced in cathedral-sized sunbeams.
“The box,” she said, her voice echoing from above. He looked up. Her face was a distant, beautiful moon. “Open it.”
The cardboard flaps were like leaning doors. He shoved one aside, the effort significant. Inside, his former life was a jumble of massive cloth. A t-shirt was a folded tapestry. A pair of his old jeans looked like sculpted denim tunnels.
“Pick something,” she said. She settled on the floor beside him, the impact a minor earthquake. Her hip was a sloping hill beside the box.
He reached in, grappling with a familiar blue cotton shirt. He tugged. It was heavy. He pulled a sleeve toward him, fighting the weight of the fabric, and managed to get the collar to the edge of the box. He located the tag, a white island in the blue sea. With both hands, he tried to tear it off. His fingers, now fine-boned and weak, slipped on the glossy surface.
He tried again, grunting with effort, his nails scrabbling. The tag didn’t even bend.
A low, warm sound vibrated through the floor. Ro was laughing. It wasn’t cruel. It was rich, full of a terrible affection.
“Here,” she rumbled. Her hand entered his field of vision, a smooth, brown continent. A single finger, broader than three of his, hooked under the tag. With a faint rrrip, it was gone. She flicked it away; it sailed like a kite.
Herc stared at the shirt, then at his hands. The hollow ache was back, a whisper of the previous night’s drain. Shame, hot and sour, flooded his mouth.
“Problem solved,” he muttered.
“One of many,” she said. Her tone had shifted. It was lower, edged with something possessive and dark. “You gonna put it on?”
He tried. He dragged the shirt out, a waterfall of fabric. He found the head-hole, a gaping orifice. He stepped into it, pulling the shirt up his body. It was a ridiculous struggle, a fight with a limp, cloth giant. He got his arms into the sleeves, which hung empty past his hands. The hem pooled around his feet.
He stood there, drowned in blue cotton, feeling like a child playing dress-up.
Ro’s gaze was a physical heat. “Still got tags on the inside,” she observed, her voice a husky drawl. “On the seam. Rough against your skin.”
He hadn’t even felt them. Now he did—scratchy little points against his ribs, his lower back.
“Can’t have that,” she purred. She didn’t move to help. She just watched, her eyes half-lidded. “Get them out.”
He tried to twist within the fabric shroud, to get his hands up inside the shirt to find the tags. The sleeves were too long, the fabric too voluminous. He wrestled with it, his frustration mounting, his movements becoming more frantic and pathetic. A sharp, plasticky edge scratched a line across his stomach.
“Ro…”
“Use your teeth.”
He froze. He looked up at her. Her expression was unreadable, a mix of stern command and molten arousal.
“What?”
“Your hands are too small. Your fingers are too weak.” She stated it as simple fact. “Your teeth aren’t. Not yet. So use them. Unpack your own clothes, Herc. Rip the tags out with your fucking teeth.”
The command landed in his gut and burned there. It was demeaning. It was animal. It was also, perversely, a kind of brutal honesty. A directive that acknowledged his new reality without pity.
He clenched his jaw. Then, with a shuddering breath, he bent forward into the cavern of his own shirt. He found the first tag by feel, the rough texture against his cheek. He turned his head, gripped the edge of the tag between his molars, and pulled.
The tearing sound was loud in the quiet studio. He spat out the fragment of paper and plastic. A surge, a tiny rivulet of that hollow feeling, passed through him. He heard Ro sigh, a deep, satisfied sound. He didn’t look. He hunted for the next tag.
He found it near the small of his back. He had to contort himself, pressing his face into the damp cotton. He bit, tore, spat. Another surge. A corresponding, soft groan from above. He felt a change in the air, a thickening. The scent of her—jasmine and warm skin—intensified.
The last tag was on the collar. He stretched his neck, biting at it, his body arching awkwardly under the fabric. He tore it free.
As he did, he finally looked up.
Ro had changed. Visibly. The strained t-shirt across her chest was now dangerously tight. The hem had ridden up, exposing a strip of stomach that seemed rounder, firmer. Her breaths were deeper, each inhale testing the integrity of the seams. Her face was flushed.
“Good,” she breathed. The word was a rumble. “Now the pants.”
He obeyed. He found the jeans. The rigid tags on the waistband were tougher. He had to saw at them with his teeth, shaking his head like a dog with a toy. Each successful rip sent a jolt through him, a transfer of substance. Each one made Ro swell. The denim of her own sweatpants stretched taut, the sound a soft, continuous creak.
He was panting, kneeling in a puddle of his own clothes, when her shadow fell over him completely.
“Enough,” she growled.
Her hands, now truly enormous, slid under his arms. She lifted him, shirt and all, until he was suspended before her face. Her lips, now fuller, softer, parted. “You’re so damn good at that.” She kissed him, a devouring, deep kiss that tasted of her power and his surrender.
She carried him to her workbench, a solid slab of scarred wood on heavy sawhorses. She swept a pile of brushes and rags to the floor with a crash. Then she sat on the bench, her thighs spreading like the roots of ancient trees on either side. She placed him, standing, between them.
The world was the canyon of her legs. The soft, worn fabric of her sweatpants rose on either side of him like weathered cliffs. The heat coming off her was immense, botanical.
“The shirt,” she commanded, her voice husky. “Off.”
He struggled out of the heavy fabric, letting it fall around his ankles. He stood naked before her, exposed and tiny.
Her gaze was a furnace. “See what you do to me?” She took his hands—his entire hands—and placed them on the inside of one of her thighs. The muscle beneath was hard as stone, hot as a forge. “Feel that.”
He could barely span the curve. He stroked the tense muscle, and he felt it jump, felt it grow even firmer. The sweatpants seam beside his cheek split with a sharp, sighing tear.
He looked up. The apex of her thighs was a continent away, a massive, soft rise of gray fabric. The scent of her, musky and sweet, was overwhelming here, a dense cloud that made his head spin and his cock, already hard, ache.
“I want you to see,” she said. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her sweatpants and panties and pushed them down in one, slow motion.
Her pussy was revealed like a shocking, beautiful secret. Plush, full, and dark, the lips swollen and glistening with her arousal. At this scale, it was a breathtaking, terrifying landscape. The rich, earthy scent bloomed, enveloping him completely.
“Look at me,” she ordered, her voice trembling with need.
He looked. His face was level with it. The sheer, intimate immensity stole his breath.
Her hand came down, not to touch him, but to cradle the back of his head. Her fingers spanned his entire skull. “You made this,” she whispered. “You did this. Now deal with it.”
She applied the gentlest pressure, guiding him forward.
His world narrowed to heat, scent, and wetness. He opened his mouth, pressing his face into her. He licked a broad, slow stripe along her seam. The taste was complex, salty-sweet, profoundly her. She jerked above him, a stifled cry echoing in the cavern of her thighs.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Just like that. Use that mouth.”
He lost himself in the act. He was a tiny worshiper at the altar of her need. He lapped at her, teased her swollen clit with the tip of his tongue, buried his face in the soft, slick folds. Each muffled sound she made, each shudder that racked her massive frame, sent a corresponding thrill of desperate pride through him. He was causing this. His diminishment was her expansion, and in this moment, that exchange was the most erotic thing he’d ever known.
Her breathing became ragged, choppy. The bench creaked dangerously under her shifting weight. One of her hands left his head and gripped the edge of the wood, splintering it.
“Don’t stop, don’t you fucking stop,” she chanted.
He didn’t. He worked her with a focus that blocked out everything else—the fear, the shame, the vanishing future. There was only this: the texture of her, the pulse of her against his tongue, the thunder of her coming climax building in the air.
It hit like a storm. She roared, a raw, ragged sound that shook the windows in their frames. Her thighs convulsed, trapping his head in a warm, crushing vise of muscle and flesh as she ground herself against his face. He was inundated, drinking her down as her body bucked and heaved through the release.
When the tremors subsided, she slumped back, her grip on his head going slack. He pulled back, gasping for air, his face slick and shining.
She looked down at him, her eyes dazed and sated. Then they darkened again. “Not enough,” she breathed. “Need you inside. Now.”
She lifted him again. Her other hand pulled aside the wet, swollen flesh of her sex. The opening revealed was a dark, inviting heat. She positioned him, the head of his cock nudging against her entrance, which felt, at this scale, like a silken, burning ring.
She lowered him onto herself.
The sensation was catastrophic. It was an all-consuming engulfment. She sheathed him in one slow, inexorable slide until his entire body was pressed against her, buried to the hilt in that incredible, tight heat. He cried out, a sharp, thin sound against her skin.
She held him there, impaled, his legs dangling. She was so deep, so complete around him, it felt less like sex and more like being reclaimed by the earth.
“Mine,” she grunted, and began to move him.
She used her hands on his hips, lifting and lowering his slight frame along the length of her. He was a puppet, a toy, a living instrument. Each stroke dragged a moan from his throat. He could see nothing but the expanse of her belly rising above him, could feel nothing but the exquisite, molten friction. His own pleasure was a secondary, distant thing, an echo of the overwhelming reality of her.
Her rhythm grew desperate, her breaths hot gusts against the studio ceiling. “Come on, baby,” she urged, her voice guttural. “Give it to me. Let me feel you.”
The permission, the raw need in her voice, unraveled him. His orgasm was a silent, shattering convulsion, a white-hot burst that seemed to drain the very last reserves from his marrow. He spilled into her, pulsing weakly, as the now-familiar hollowing sensation ripped through him in a final, dizzying wave.
As he finished, he felt her climax again—a deeper, more rolling quake that milked him dry. A loud, sustained rrrrrip filled the air as the back of her t-shirt finally gave way, splitting from collar to hem.
They stayed like that, joined, for a long time. His face pressed against the sweat-slick, impossibly vast slope of her stomach. Her breaths slowly settled.
Finally, she lifted him out. He was boneless, depleted. She held him in one palm, using the torn remains of her shirt to gently clean him, then herself. She set him on the workbench, where he sat, shivering.
She stood. The ruined t-shirt and sweatpants fell from her in shreds. She stood naked in the streaming light, a goddess of impossible proportions. She looked down at her own body, then at him, her expression shifting from sated awe to something like horror.
On the bench, Herc looked at his own hands, then at the blue shirt that now lay next to him like a deflated tent. He picked up a sleeve. He could fit his entire arm and shoulder into it.
He wasn't just small now.
He was child-sized.
Ro took a step back, her footfall shaking the floor. She brought a hand to her mouth. A low, despairing sound escaped her. "What are we doing?"
Herc had no answer. He just stared at the sleeve, and at the towering, magnificent, terrified woman who now seemed to fill the sky.
The silence between them wasn’t empty; it was a cavern filling with the echoes of what they’d just done. Ro’s hand, still covering her mouth, slowly lowered. She stared at it as if it belonged to someone else—the fingers thicker, the palm a broader landscape of lines and calluses.
“We have to stop,” she said. The words had no force, just a hollow resonance.
Herc let the sleeve fall from his fingers. The soft whump of cotton on wood was deafening. “Okay.” His voice was a reed in a wind tunnel. “You first.”
Her laugh was a short, pained burst. “Fuck you.”
“Just did.” He gestured weakly at the space between them, at the ruins of her clothes on the floor. “Or did you miss that part?”
She turned away, her movements suddenly clumsy. Her shoulder brushed a hanging mobile of painted gears, setting them clattering. She looked at the destruction a casual turn of her body could now cause. A shudder ran through her, a seismic ripple of muscle under skin. She wrapped her arms around herself, but the gesture was unfamiliar—her own body a stranger she couldn’t fully contain.
“I need to think,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. She strode—two vast steps—to a towering armoire in the corner. When she opened it, the door groaned on its hinges. She pulled out a bolt of fabric, a remnant of a mural backdrop, a deep crimson cotton. She tore a strip from it with a sound like ripping sailcloth.
She came back to the bench, the red fabric trailing from her fist like a bleeding banner. “Arms out.”
He complied. She looped the fabric around him, wrapping it over one shoulder and under the opposite arm, creating a crude, toga-like sheath. Her fingers, despite their new scale, were deft. She tied it securely at his hip. The material was heavy, but it covered him. He was a tiny senator in a giant’s world.
“There,” she said, her breath a warm gust that stirred his hair. “Clothes.”
“Robes,” he corrected, looking down at the drapes. “You’ve dressed me in curtains.”
“They’re clean.” She stepped back, surveying her work. Her gaze kept snagging on his exposed shoulder, the delicate collar bone, the child-like slope of his neck. She swallowed hard. “I’m going to make coffee. A lot of it.”
She moved to the kitchenette, her every step a conscious negotiation with a world grown brittle. The ceramic mug she pulled from a shelf looked like a delicate thimble in her grip. He watched her, this monumental woman trying to perform a simple task, her concentration absolute. The normalcy of it was the most surreal thing he’d witnessed.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she said, not turning from the sink as she filled the kettle.
“How? My brain’s probably the size of a walnut now.”
“Still louder than the water.” She set the kettle on the stove. The click of the gas igniter was a cannon crack in the quiet. “You’re thinking this is a one-way street. That I’m just… taking.”
He said nothing. The accusation in her voice was fresh, a new wound.
She turned, leaning back against the counter. The posture made her seem even more immense, a statue of a fertility goddess in a cramped gallery. “You think I don’t feel it? The weight? It’s not just physical, Herc. It’s your anger. Your pride. Your fucking stubbornness. It’s dense. It sits in my joints like lead.” She tapped her temple. “And your memories. Flashes of your old basketball games. The smell of your dad’s cologne. It’s all packing itself into my skull. I’m not just getting bigger. I’m getting fuller of you.”
The confession landed between them, monstrous and true. The kettle began its low whistle, building to a scream.
She didn’t move to stop it. “So don’t you dare paint this like I’m the vampire. You’re feeding me, and I can’t fucking chew fast enough.”
The whistle became a shriek. Herc flinched. Ro finally turned, yanking the kettle from the flame. Silence rushed back in, ringing.
“I’m scared I’ll disappear,” he said, so quietly he wasn’t sure she heard.
She poured the water, steam billowing around her head like a storm cloud. “I’m scared you won’t.” She brought the two mugs over. His was a small, handled cup she used for brushes. It was still too large for him, requiring two hands to lift. She sat on the floor, bringing her face closer to his level on the bench. The coffee smelled bitter, wonderful.
They drank in silence for a minute. The warmth spread through Herc, a tiny anchor.
“What’s the move, then?” he asked. “Abstinence? Celibacy?”
She snorted. “After that? We’d spontaneously combust.” She ran a thumb over the rim of her mug. “We need to understand it. Control it.”
“Science project.”
“Survival project.” Her eyes met his, deadly serious. “We set rules. Boundaries.”
“Like what? A safe word?”
“A safe distance.” She gestured with her chin to the other side of the studio. “You sleep there tonight. I sleep here. We see if just… proximity does it. If the transfer happens just because we’re in the same goddamn room.”
He felt a cold spike of rejection at the idea. It was immediately followed by shame. Her plan was rational. Necessary. “Fine.”
“Fine.” She stood, the conversation clearly over. “I have canvases to prep. You should… rest.”
He watched her walk away, a tectonic plate shifting across the continental shelf of her studio. She picked up a large, unstretched canvas, taller than she was, and leaned it against a wall. She began sketching with a thick piece of charcoal, her movements broad and sweeping. She was working on something new.
Herc slid off the bench, the drop longer than it should have been, the impact jarring his ankles. He wandered the vast plains of her space, a tiny ghost in a cathedral of creation. He found himself standing before the defaced cityscape mural, the one that bore the phantom smear of his back from weeks ago. She hadn’t painted over it. The ghost-Herc was now laughably large compared to his current form.
He heard the crunch of charcoal, the rhythmic scratching. He turned.
On the new canvas, she was drawing a single, colossal figure from a low-angle perspective. It was a woman, seated, her form both powerful and weary. In the cradle of her lap, drawn with the faintest, most delicate lines, was a tiny, detailed city. Skyscrapers, bridges, streets—all contained within the curve of her hand.
She was drawing her own terror. She was drawing a world where she contained everything, including him.
The ache returned, not a hollowing this time, but a deep, longing pull. It was directed at her, a compass needle finding its north. He fought it. He walked deliberately to the far corner she’d indicated, a nook with an old armchair that smelled of dust and turpentine. He climbed into it, the crimson fabric of his robe snagging on the rough upholstery. He curled into a ball, facing away from her.
He focused on his breathing. Out. The scent of coffee on his own breath. The distant, gritty sound of her charcoal.
Hours bled. The light through the high windows softened into evening gold. The scratching stopped. He heard the rustle of her putting things away. The click of a lamp. Then her footsteps, moving not toward her sleeping area, but pacing. A slow, heavy tread that vibrated through the floorboards into the bones of his chair.
He could feel her wakefulness like a pressure change. He could feel her looking at him.
“You awake?” Her voice cut through the dimness, softer now.
“Yeah.”
“It’s not working.”
The admission hung there. He uncurled, turning. She stood in the middle of the room, a silhouette against the amber window light. She was wringing her hands, a nervous gesture that made her knuckles pop like small-caliber gunfire.
“What’s not?”
“The distance.” Her voice was thick. “I can feel you over there. A little… siphon. A slow drip from your glass into mine. It’s making me crazy.”
He sat up. The longing pull was in his chest too, a taut wire connecting his sternum to the center of her mass. “So the rule’s broken.”
“The rule was stupid.” She took a step toward him. Then another. “I can’t think around it. I can only feel it.”
She knelt before his chair, bringing her face level with his. In the low light, her features were all shadows and profound scale. Her breath washed over him, warm and quickening. “Tell me to stop,” she whispered, a plea.
He reached out. His hand, disappearing against the sheer cliff of her cheek, trembled. “I don’t want to.”
A low groan escaped her. She leaned forward, closing the distance, and kissed him. It was not tender. It was a claiming, a desperate verification of his reality. Her tongue pushed into his mouth, and he yielded to the invasion, a delicious submission. She tasted of coffee and dark, unnameable want.
Her hands came up, and she lifted him from the chair as if he were made of air. She carried him back to the workbench, sweeping it clear with one arm. The crash of supplies hitting the floor was irrelevant. She laid him back on the cool, scarred wood. The crimson robe was a triviality; she untied it with a single tug, baring him.
She stood over him, looking down at his small, pale form against the dark wood. Her own nakedness was a landscape of power. “This time,” she said, her voice guttural, “you watch. You see what you do.”
She climbed onto the bench, straddling him, her knees framing his hips like the pillars of a gateway. She loomed above, a living ceiling of flesh and desire. With one hand, she reached between her own legs, her fingers disappearing into the thatch of dark curls. She rubbed herself, her eyes locked on his, letting him see the raw, wet need. A drop of her arousal fell, landing warm on his stomach.
“See that?” she panted. “That’s you. That’s all you.”
She shifted forward, positioning herself. Her other hand wrapped around his cock, her fingers forming a loose, hot tunnel. At this scale, his erection was a slight thing in her grasp, but she treated it with a reverence that made his heart stutter. She guided himself to her entrance, a slick, blooming heat he could feel from inches away.
“Now,” she commanded, and she sank down.
The sensation was one of absolute, breathtaking envelopment. She took him inside, an effortless absorption that buried him completely in her molten depths. He was a speck within her, a pinprick of sensation in a universe of feeling. She didn’t move at first. She let him feel the incredible, pulsating tightness, the way her internal muscles fluttered around his negligible girth.
“Oh god,” he whimpered, his hands splaying against the tremendous thighs that pinned him.
“No god here,” she grunted. “Just me.” Then she began to move.
Her motion was a rolling, grinding undulation of her hips. She used her internal muscles to clutch and massage him, creating friction not from thrusting, but from the sheer, overwhelming pressure and movement of her walls around him. It was an experience of total incorporation. He could only lay there, impaled and helpless, as she fucked herself on his body.
Her breaths came in ragged, open-mouthed gusts. She braced her hands on the bench on either side of his head, her arms trembling. Her breasts, massive and heavy, swung above him, her nipples hardening into dark peaks. “You like being in there?” she growled. “Being my little secret?”
He could only nod, his vision blurring at the edges.
“Tell me.”
“Yes,” he gasped. “I’m yours. All yours.”
Her rhythm broke, becoming jerkier, more frantic. “Gonna come,” she warned, not as a question, but as a declaration of inevitable fact. “Gonna come with you stuffed inside me. Gonna milk you dry.”
Her interior clamped down on him, a series of violent, rhythmic pulses that pulled his orgasm from him like a root from the earth. He came with a silent scream, his body arching off the wood as he emptied into her depths, a minuscule offering to her vastness. The hollowing sensation that followed was instant and brutal, a vertigo that felt like his soul was being inhaled.
As he pulsed within her, she threw her head back and roared. Her climax was a cataclysm. Her whole body shuddered, the bench squealing in protest. She ground down onto him, milking him through both their releases, each contraction of her channel pulling more of his essence into her.
When it was over, she collapsed forward, catching her weight on her elbows just in time to avoid crushing him. Her face was damp with sweat, her eyes wild. She slowly lifted herself off him, his spent cock slipping free with a soft, wet sound.
He lay utterly empty, a vessel cracked and dry. The room seemed to swim, the scale shifting yet again. The workbench surface felt colder, wider. The scent of her sex and their mingled sweat was a fog in the air.
Ro rolled to sit on the edge of the bench, her feet hitting the floor with a double thud. She looked at her hands, then slowly closed them into fists. She looked back at him, her expression shifting from sated to shattered. Her voice, when it came, was a broken thing.
“Herc?”
He tried to answer. His voice wouldn’t come. He pushed himself up on shaking arms. He looked down at his own body, at the space between his hands on the wood. The distance was greater. His hands were smaller. Fine-boned. A child’s hands.
He wasn't just child-sized now.
He was a toddler in a giantess's world.
Ro’s hand flew to her mouth. A low, wounded noise, like a trapped animal, escaped her throat. Her other hand rose, and in the lamplight, he saw it. The change wasn't just in her mass. The skin on the back of her hand was smoother, tighter. The few silver hairs that had sparkled there were gone.
She wasn't just bigger.
She was younger.