Chapter 24: Obsession Awakening
The world was a warm, thick, endless swallowing. Chad’s universe had narrowed to the mechanics of throat and gut. Gulping was no longer an action; it was a state of being. A rhythmic, mandatory convulsion that pulled the warm, bittersweet sludge into him, filling his stomach with a heavy, slosching weight. His thoughts had dissolved into a single, continuous loop: swallow, breathe through the nose, swallow again.
The initial tsunami had settled into a powerful, constant river. It flowed around him, cocooning him in a pressure that was both suffocating and strangely secure. He was a cork in a bottle, a living plug, and the liquid contents of a goddess’s bowels were his only reality.
Outside, the lake on the concrete had grown, a placid, brown sea now inches deep and slowly creeping toward the broken servers. Its surface was smooth, oddly glossy under the flickering lights.
Kindra stood at its edge, her shoes long discarded to save them. Her black-polished toes curled against the cold, dry concrete island she remained on. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths. She wasn't watching the waste. She was staring, fixated, at the place where Chad had vanished. At the subtle, rhythmic pulsing of the immense, shadowed cleft. At the soft, wet sounds of his labored consumption that merged with the deeper gurgles from Maddie’s core.
Her fingers, which had been digging into her own palms, slowly relaxed. She brought one hand up, staring at her perfect black nails. They were clean. She was clean. Untouched by the chaos, separate from the brutal, biological exchange happening just feet away.
A hot, twisting thrill coiled in her stomach. It was entirely different from the intellectual arousal of controlled growth, of power and scale. This was darker. Grittier. It was the thrill of witnessing absolute degradation, of seeing Chad—charismatic, oblivious, normal Chad—reduced to a single, base function. For her. Because of her calculation.
Maddie’s low moan reverberated through the warehouse. It wasn’t a sound of pain now, but of profound, empty relief. “Oh… oh, wow,” her voice slurred, distant and dreamy. “It’s just… going. I can’t even feel it leaving. It’s like… draining a swimming pool.” She shifted, a monumental settling of weight. The flow around Chad increased for a moment, and his muffled gagging was audible even over the hum of machinery.
Kindra’s breath hitched. The sound of his struggle did something to her. It wasn’t pity. It was fascination. A predatory curiosity. She took a step forward, her bare foot meeting the warm, shallow edge of the brown lake. The sensation—the temperature, the slight viscosity—made her toes curl again, this time in pleasure.
“Is he… is he keeping up?” Maddie asked, her voice filled with a lazy, post-coital indifference.
Kindra didn’t answer immediately. She waded in. The warm liquid rose to her ankles. It was surprisingly smooth, like thin pudding. “His consumption rate appears sufficient to prevent catastrophic pressure buildup,” she said, her voice quiet, almost reverent. “The system is stable.”
She moved closer to the source. The air grew hotter, richer with the odor. It should have been repulsive. To a part of her, it was. But a larger, newer part found it intoxicatingly real. This was no longer about abstract gigantism. It was about mass, consequence, and the messy, human cost of it all. Her eyes traveled up the vast, sloping plain of Maddie’s hip, over the incredible, flowing rolls of her stomach, to the distant rise of her breast. Maddie was no longer a girl with a condition. She was a landscape. A soft, endless, sleeping geography of flesh.
And Chad was buried in her most secret valley.
Kindra felt a flush spread across her chest and up her neck. Her own body responded, a faint, familiar tingling in her bones, a yearning to expand, to match this new, overwhelming scale of presence. But she clamped down on it. Not yet. This wasn't her show. This was Maddie's… and Chad's.
She stopped when she was close enough to feel the radiant heat from Maddie’s body. The sound of Chad’s efforts was clearer here—a desperate, suckling noise, punctuated by choked breaths.
“Chad?” Kindra said, her voice barely above a whisper.
The sounds stopped for a second. A wet, shaky inhale. “Yeah?” The reply was thick, blurred, utterly broken.
“Report.”
A weak, hysterical laugh bubbled out from the darkness, followed by a cough. “Report? It’s… it’s vanilla-chocolate swirl, Kindra. With… notes of digested protein powder and existential dread.” He gulped, the sound loud and effortful. “Volume is… unending. Tell me… tell me there’s an end.”
Kindra looked up at Maddie’s face. The giantess’s eyes were closed, a serene smile on her lips. Her breathing was deep and steady. The monumental rise and fall of her chest was slowing. She was falling asleep.
“The source is entering a dormant phase,” Kindra called down, her analytical tone forced. “Pressure should begin to decrease.”
“Thank Christ,” Chad groaned. The sucking sounds resumed, but slower now. The river was becoming a stream.
Kindra stood in the warm silence, the brown liquid around her thighs. She looked at her hands, then at the phenomenal bulk of her sleeping friend. She thought of Chad inside, swallowed by the result of their games. The coiled thrill in her stomach tightened, becoming a specific, acute ache.
She wanted to see.
Not with clinical detachment. She wanted to observe.
“Chad,” she said, her voice losing its steady pitch. “I need to verify the exit pathway is clear.”
“What? It’s clear! It’s too clear! Go away!”
“Visual confirmation is required.” She moved forward, through the deepening muck, until she was directly before the shadowed aperture. The heat was immense. The smell was primal. She reached out, her fingers trembling slightly, and brushed against the soft, fever-hot skin of Maddie’s inner thigh. It yielded like rising dough.
Taking a steadying breath she didn't feel, Kindra leaned closer, peering into the dark, pulsing tunnel.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The light from the warehouse filtered in, casting a dim glow on the slick, pinkish-brown walls of muscle. And there, about three feet in, was Chad.
He was on his hands and knees, coated entirely in a glistening, dark sheen. His back was to her, his body hunched over, his head buried. The rhythm of his shoulders told her he was still swallowing, taking the last of the flow. He looked small. Not just in scale, but in essence. Stripped of every pretense, reduced to a raw, functioning animal.
Kindra’s mouth went dry. The ache within her bloomed, hot and urgent. This was the most intimate, the most real thing she had ever seen. It was horrifying. It was beautiful.
Chad shuddered, spasmed, and vomited a gout of the same brown slurry. He gasped, coughing violently. “I’m full,” he whimpered, the sound echoing softly in the fleshy chamber. “I can’t… I’m so full.”
The flow from above had trickled to a stop. The internal groans from Maddie had ceased. A profound, exhausted silence settled, broken only by Chad’s ragged breathing and the drip of waste from his chin.
He started to crawl backward, movements sluggish and pained. He turned as he emerged, blinking blindly into the comparative light of the warehouse. He saw Kindra first. Her face, calm and intense, framed by the colossal architecture of Maddie’s body. He saw her eyes, wide and dark, taking him in. He saw where she was standing, what she was surrounded by.
He collapsed onto his side in the shallow lake, exhausted, soaked, and utterly ruined. He stared up at her. “Happy?” he croaked.
Kindra didn’t answer. She slowly sank down into the warm muck herself, until she was kneeling at his level, face to face. She reached out a clean, perfect hand and brushed a clump of sodden hair from his forehead. Her touch was cool against his feverish skin.
“You performed adequately,” she whispered. But her eyes said something else. They were hungry, appreciative. They traced the lines of his soiled face.
From high above, a seismic snore erupted from Maddie. She was asleep, a continent of flesh at rest, her problems literally expelled.
Chad tried to sit up, failed. “We need to get out of here. We need to… to clean this. To clean me.”
“Yes,” Kindra agreed, but she made no move to get up. Her gaze drifted past him, to the sleeping giantess. “But first, we need to understand what happens when she wakes up. Her mass is unchanged. The caloric intake was historic.” Her eyes snapped back to his. “And you… you self-regulated. From inside a gastrointestinal tract. That’s new.”
Chad just groaned, letting his head fall back with a soft splash. “I want a shower. I want a toothbrush. I want to forget this ever happened.”
Kindra’s lips, painted a dark plum, curved into the faintest, most genuine smile he had ever seen on her. It wasn't playful. It was possessed. “I don’t think I will,” she said softly. She finally stood, offering him her hand. It was clean, while everything else was defiled. “The warehouse has an industrial sink in the repair bay. The water is cold.”
He stared at her hand, then at his own, trembling and filthy. The distance between them felt infinite. He took it. Her grip was firm, pulling him up to his unsteady feet. They stood together in the silent, ruined warehouse, in the lake they had made, beneath the sleeping giant, their hands still clasped.
The hum of the servers seemed louder now. The flickering lights cast their long, tangled shadows on the walls. The crisis was over, but the air was thick with something new, something far more complicated than any growth spurt. It was the quiet, terrifying sound of a boundary dissolving, and of Kindra seeing, for the very first time, exactly what she wanted.
The silence stretched, heavy and wet. Chad finally let go of Kindra’s hand, the clean imprint of her fingers a stark contrast to the rest of him. He looked down at himself, at the lake they stood in, then at the sleeping mountain of his friend.
“A hose,” he said, his voice raspy. “There’s a hose on the loading dock wall.”
Kindra nodded, her clinical focus returning like a shield. “I’ll retrieve it. You should begin moving salvageable inventory to the elevated pallets.” She gestured to the few dry islands in the room. “Minimize loss.”
He almost laughed. Minimize loss. His shoes were ruined, his soul felt scoured, and a billion calories of digested shake were settling into his intestines, but sure. Inventory.
They worked without speaking for a long time. The cold water from the hose was a brutal shock, but Chad welcomed the numbness. He sprayed himself first, watching the brown water sluice off his body and join the wider sea. The smell changed, shifting from intimate decay to generic wet filth. It was an improvement.
Kindra took the hose from him, her movements efficient. She began on the far walls, blasting streams of water to push the waste toward the central floor drain. It was slow, disgusting work. The silence was broken by the spray of water, the scrape of plastic boxes being dragged, and Maddie’s earth-shaking snores.
Chad dragged a toppled rack of hard drives, his muscles protesting. “We’re never getting the smell out,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
“Enzyme cleaner,” Kindra called over the sound of water. “The janitorial closet has industrial grade. It will break down the organic compounds.” She paused, looking back at him. Her shirt and leggings were soaked, clinging to her small frame. “It’s just chemistry.”
“Right. Chemistry.” He heaved a box. “Just a standard Tuesday night. Girl grows to the size of a bus, another girl watches you… do that, and then you mop up the aftermath with a hose. Standard chemistry.”
A faint smile touched Kindra’s lips. She didn’t reply.
They found the enzyme cleaner, great translucent gallons of it, and poured the sharp-smelling liquid over the floor. They used push brooms, the kind with wide rubber blades, to herd the diluted mess toward the drain. It was physical, mindless labor. Chad’s shock began to recede, replaced by a deep, aching fatigue. He stole glances at Kindra. She worked with a relentless, precise energy, her black nails chipped now, her hair escaping its ponytail.
He noticed something else, too. As the hours crawled toward dawn, Maddie was getting smaller.
It wasn’t sudden. It was achingly slow, like a glacier melting in reverse. The first sign was the space. The shelves she’d crushed began to appear from beneath the retreating curve of her hip. The groaning pressure on the walls eased. Her form softened, not with the taut expansion of growth, but with a gentle deflation. The incredible, flowing rolls of her stomach shallowed, pulling back like a tide from the concrete shore. Her colossal breasts lost their skyward ambition, settling into softer, human proportions.
Chad stopped sweeping, leaning on the broom handle. “Look.”
Kindra followed his gaze. Maddie, still deeply asleep, was now only double her normal size, then just slightly larger. The torn remnants of her clothing, which had been stretched to transparent filaments, now pooled around her like the shed skin of some larger creature. Her breathing was quiet, normal.
“Metabolic normalization,” Kindra whispered, but the wonder in her voice was personal, not scientific. “The energy was expended. The mass couldn’t be sustained.”
By the time the floor was mostly clean, just a damp, faintly-smelling concrete expanse, Maddie was herself again. A perfectly normal-sized woman curled naked and asleep on a folded tarp they’d managed to slide under her. The warehouse was a disaster zone of broken racks and soaked boxes, but she was just Maddie.
Chad found a discarded work blanket, relatively clean, and draped it over her. The gesture felt absurdly normal.
Maddie’s eyes fluttered open. She blinked, squinting in the fluorescent light. She looked at Chad’s exhausted, clean face, then at Kindra, who was wringing out her hair. She looked at the devastation around them.
“Whoa,” she breathed, her voice soft and rough with sleep. “Did I… miss the party?”
Chad let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “Something like that.”
Kindra helped Maddie sit up, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. Maddie winced, touching her stomach. “I feel… hollow. And really sore. Like I did a thousand crunches.” She looked at Chad, a slow, dawning realization in her eyes. “You… you were in my butt.”
“Yeah, Maddie. I was.”
“And you… drank my poop.”
Chad closed his eyes. “Let’s never, ever say that sentence again.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t look sorry. She looked fascinated. A slow, tired grin spread across her face. “It felt… really weird. And kinda amazing. I could feel you, like, a little knot of panic back there. It was the only thing I could feel.” She glanced at Kindra, her grin turning conspiratorial. “That was way more intense than the milkshakes.”
Kindra’s posture straightened. She met Maddie’s gaze directly. “I found it compelling,” she stated, her bluntness like a hammer in the quiet room. “Your expansion. The sheer physical dominance of it. The way he was overwhelmed.” Her eyes cut to Chad. “The way he was used by it. I enjoyed that very much.”
Maddie’s grin widened. “I know, right? I loved that part too. Him being all helpless in there.” She nudged Chad with her foot. “No offense.”
“All the offense,” Chad mumbled, but the edge was gone. He was too tired for edges.
They helped a wobbly Maddie to her feet. The walk back to their apartment complex was surreal in the pre-dawn gray. They were three kids in rumpled, damp clothes, smelling of chemicals and exhaustion, moving through a sleeping world. No one spoke. The normalcy of sidewalks and streetlights felt like a dream.
Inside their apartment, the familiarity was jarring. The couch, the TV, the kitchenette. It all seemed impossibly small and safe.
Maddie shuffled toward the bathroom. “I’m claiming the shower for, like, a year.”
The door closed. The lock clicked.
Chad stood in the middle of the living room, dripping on the rug. Kindra stood near the doorway, watching him.
“Your turn next,” she said softly.
He just shook his head, walking to the spare bathroom. The hot water was a blessing. He scrubbed until his skin was raw, but the memory felt like a stain no soap could touch. When he emerged in a cloud of steam, wearing borrowed sweatpants, he found Kindra in the kitchen, making tea. She had changed into simple black shorts and a tank top.
She handed him a mug without a word. He took it.
Maddie emerged, swaddled in a fluffy robe, her hair in a towel. She collapsed onto the couch between them with a sigh that seemed to come from her bones. For a long minute, they just sat in the dim lamplight, sipping tea, listening to the hum of the refrigerator.
“So,” Maddie said, her voice casual, as if discussing the weather. “I really, really love getting that fat. Like, a lot.”
Kindra took a slow sip. “I observed. And I found that I love you being that fat. The visual, the tactile reality of it. The power shift.”
They both looked at Chad.
He stared into his tea. “And I love being a human plumbing snake. It’s my passion.”
Maddie giggled, kicking his leg gently with her foot. “You know what I mean. You being all overwhelmed. Lost in it. It’s hot.”
He finally looked at her, then at Kindra. Their expressions were open, hungry, and utterly sincere. There was no joke here. This was the after-action report. The boundary was not just dissolved; it had been paved over and a new road built.
“I need to sleep for a thousand years,” he said, standing up.
“Okay,” Maddie said, smiling. “But tomorrow’s a work day.”
Kindra’s dark eyes held his. “We will see you at the store, Chad.”
He just nodded, retreating to the small guest room. He closed the door and leaned against it, hearing their muted voices through the thin wall.
“He did good,” Maddie whispered.
“He performed exceptionally,” Kindra corrected, her voice a low hum. “The potential for further study is significant.”
Maddie’s laugh was a soft, happy sound. “I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
Chad slid down the door to sit on the floor. In the other room, the two women went to their own bed, whispering excitedly in the dark about calibration, about sugar content, about the specific look on his face when the flow began. Their words were a gentle, relentless murmur.
He stared at the slice of streetlight cutting across the carpet. His body was clean. The warehouse was behind them. But as he listened to their eager, planning voices, he understood with perfect clarity that the event was not over. It had only just been initialized.
Tomorrow, the flirtation would begin anew. And it would have a terrifying, specific direction.
He put his head in his hands, and waited for the morning.
The morning light through the blinds felt like an accusation. It laid bare the dust on the dresser and the normalcy of the room, a stark contrast to the film reel of horror playing behind his eyes. Chad moved through the apartment like a ghost, the smell of enzyme cleaner still haunting his sinuses. The clatter of dishes from the kitchen was jarringly loud.
Maddie was at the stove, humming. The scent of burning eggs mixed with her vanilla perfume. “You want some?” she asked, not turning around. Her voice was breezy, as if last night had been a particularly wild movie night. “I’m starving. Like, post-marathon starving.”
“I’ll pass,” Chad said, his own voice gravelly. His stomach was a solid, acidic lump. The thought of food made his throat close.
“Suit yourself.” She piled a mountainous scramble onto two plates. “KINDRA! BREAKFAST!”
Kindra emerged from the bathroom, her hair damp, dressed in her usual black. She looked at Chad, her gaze a clinical scan. “Did you experience any gastric distress during the night? Cramping? Nausea?”
“Just the existential kind.” He poured coffee, his hands steady only through force of will.
They ate in the living room, a parody of domesticity. Maddie devoured her food with a vigor that was unsettling. Kindra picked at hers, her eyes distant. Chad sipped his coffee, the bitterness matching his mood. The silence was a living thing.
“We need to assess the damage at the warehouse before the district manager’s site visit Thursday,” Kindra finally said, placing her fork down with precise finality. “The structural integrity of two shelving units is compromised. We’ll need to file a report citing faulty bolt welding.”
Maddie snorted, spraying a little egg. “Faulty bolt welding. I like it. The truth is weirder.”
“The truth is irrelevant,” Kindra stated. Her foot, tucked under her on the couch, tapped a rapid, silent rhythm against the cushion. “The narrative is what protects us.”
Chad watched that foot. The black polish was flawless. The arch was high. It was a beautiful foot, detached from the body that had engineered his ruin. His knuckles tightened around his mug.
“He’s staring at your feet,” Maddie sang, nudging Kindra with her elbow.
“I am not.”
“You totally are.” Maddie’s grin was wide and knowing. “It’s okay. She likes it.”
Kindra didn’t deny it. She watched Chad over the rim of her coffee cup, her expression unreadable. The tapping of her foot slowed, then stopped. She deliberately stretched her leg out, planting her sole flat on the scuffed wooden floor. An offering. A test.
The air in the room thickened. Maddie watched them both, her chewing slowing.
Chad put his mug down. The click against the table was too loud. He stood up, the movement jerky. He needed air. He needed out. He took two steps toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Kindra’s voice was quiet but it pinned him to the spot.
“Work. Early. Anything.”
“It’s your day off,” Maddie said.
“I don’t care.”
He turned to face them. Maddie’s playful look had softened into something like concern. Kindra’s was sheer, focused intensity. The memory of her kneeling in the muck, her clean hand brushing his filthy hair, slammed into him. The hungry look in her eyes. The possessive thrill in her voice when she’d said she enjoyed it.
His anger, cold and sharp, finally found its target. It wasn’t Maddie, a force of nature. It was Kindra, the architect. “You liked it,” he said, the words hitting the quiet room like stones. “You stood there and watched and you… liked it.”
Kindra didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“That’s sick.”
“It’s data. It’s a response. It happened.”
“I happened!” His voice cracked. “I was in there! I was… consuming it! For you!”
“For us,” Maddie corrected softly, setting her plate aside.
Chad ignored her, his eyes locked on Kindra. “You got off on it. On my… degradation.”
A faint flush colored Kindra’s neck. Her analytical armor had a crack. “The power dynamic was… compelling. Your compliance was novel.” She was choosing her words with surgical care, but her breath was slightly shallow.
“My compliance?” A harsh laugh escaped him. “I was drowning! You gave me a choice between drowning in shit or drowning in shit!”
“And you chose to swim,” she fired back, her own coolness fracturing. She stood up, facing him. She was so much smaller, but she seemed to fill the space. “You chose to survive. You adapted. That was the compelling part! Watching you find a way through an impossible scenario. Seeing what you would do.”
Her chest was rising and falling now. Her eyes were too bright. Chad recognized the signs, the subtle shift in the atmosphere that preceded her growth. The air always got heavier, charged.
Maddie saw it too. She slowly uncurled from the couch, her playful demeanor gone. “Kins… take a breath.”
Kindra wasn’t listening. She was staring at Chad, a torrent of unspoken things behind her eyes—the fascination, the hunger, the terrifying admiration. “You touched something in me,” she whispered, the confession ripping out of her. “In that place. You made it real.”
The tingling in the air became a palpable hum. A glass of water on the table vibrated, sending tiny ripples across its surface. Kindra shuddered, a full-body spasm. She looked down at her hands. Her fingers were lengthening, the black nails becoming distant islands.
“Oh, here we go,” Maddie murmured, a mix of worry and excitement in her voice.
Kindra was growing. It was slow, intentional, different from Maddie’s bloat. She was stretching, her frame elongating, her proportions perfectly scaling up. Her tank top began to strain across her shoulders. The hem of her shorts crept higher on her thighs.
Chad watched, frozen. This wasn’t an accident. This was a manifestation. Of him. Of what he’d done. Of what she’d seen.
She was six feet tall, then seven, her head nearing the ceiling fan. She had to look down to meet his eyes. The clinical detachment was gone, burned away by raw, amplifed emotion. She was feeling everything more intensely—her anger, her desire, her need for control. It was all magnified, written in the new, powerful lines of her body.
“You think it’s sick?” Her voice was deeper, resonant, filling the apartment. It vibrated in his bones. “You have no idea what’s inside me. You saw a fraction.”
She took a step toward him. The floorboard groaned under her new weight. Chad stumbled back, hitting the wall.
“Kindra, stop,” he said, but it came out a plea.
“Why?” The word was a challenge. She was eight feet tall now. Her shorts were dangerously tight, the fabric thin. Her feet, now much larger, were directly in front of him. They were still perfect, the arches higher, the black polish gleaming. A part of his brain, detached and hysterical, noted they were still beautiful.
He slid down the wall, sitting on the floor, overwhelmed. He was facing her feet. They were bare, inches from his knees. The scent of her, warm spice and clean skin, washed over him, overpowering the smell of eggs.
“Look at me,” her voice commanded from above.
He couldn’t. He stared at her feet. At the curve of her instep. At the delicate alignment of her toes. They were the only part of this colossal, terrifying woman that looked familiar. The only part that still looked like Kindra.
His anger dissolved, replaced by a drowning helplessness. And a bizarre, clinging thread of responsibility. He had done this. His actions, his presence, had unlocked this.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, not even sure what he was apologizing for.
“Don’t be sorry,” Maddie said from the sidelines, her voice awed. “Just… talk to her.”
He had to stop this. He had to reach her. But the real her, the one buried under this reactive, growing layer of power and passion. He remembered her touch in the warehouse. How human it had felt.
Slowly, his hand trembling, he reached out.
His fingertips made contact with the warm, smooth skin of her instep. He expected her to flinch, to pull away. She didn’t. She went perfectly still.
The humming in the air stuttered.
He traced a line down to her ankle bone, his touch feather-light. It was an intimate gesture, absurd in its gentleness given the circumstances. He was touching her foot while she loomed over him, a giantess born of his own trauma.
Her breath hitched, a sharp intake that echoed in the quiet room.
He applied the faintest pressure, a slow, deliberate massage with his thumb along the tension he imagined was there. He didn’t look up. He focused all his attention on this one, small point of contact. On the feel of her skin under his. On the subtle shift in her stance as she accepted his touch.
The growth stopped.
The terrifying expansion paused, hanging in the balance. The vibrating glass stilled.
A soft, shuddering sigh filtered down from above. It wasn’t a sound of arousal this time. It was one of profound, unexpected release. The rigid line of her posture softened.
He dared to look up. She was still tall, over eight feet, but the frantic energy was gone from her eyes. They were wide, vulnerable, locked on his hand as it gently cradled her foot. Her lips were parted.
“Chad,” she breathed, his name a foreign, wonderful sound in her new, deep voice.
He didn’t speak. He just kept touching her, his movements becoming more confident, tracing the lines of her metatarsals, circling her ankle. It was an anchor. A tether thrown to a sinking ship.
Her other hand came down, bracing herself against the wall beside his head. Her fingers, now large enough to cradle his skull, brushed against his hair. It wasn’t a grab. It was a caress. A question.
Maddie, forgotten in the corner, watched with her hand over her mouth, her eyes shining.
Kindra was shrinking. It was as deliberate as the growth had been. She willed herself down, her form condensing, the powerful giantess melting away like a receding tide. She didn’t stop at her normal height. She went smaller, until she was kneeling on the floor before him, her head level with his.
Her feet were in his lap now, her hands resting on his shoulders. They were face to face. Her eyes searched his, filled with a stunned, disarmed wonder.
He was still touching her foot, his thumb resting in the hollow of her arch. The connection was electric, fragile, and utterly silent.
Maddie let out the breath she’d been holding. It was a loud, shaky sound in the quiet. “Well,” she whispered. “That’s new.”