Chapter 2: First Morning as a Pet
Cole woke to a universe of soft, grey light and the smell of artificial lavender. His head throbbed, a dull echo of the catastrophic changes his body had endured. He was lying on something plush, a surface that yielded under his slight weight. He blinked, trying to orient himself.
He was in a vast, fabric landscape. A folded silk handkerchief, he realized, hemmed with delicate stitching that rose around him like smoothed mountain ridges. Above, the world was a haze of glowing white, a diffused light source that hurt his eyes. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, the simple motion requiring careful balance.
Memory flooded back, cold and sickening. The fever. The shrinking. The collar.
His hand flew to his neck. The leather band was there, snug and inescapable. The fine chain lay under it, the tag cool against his sternum. A whimper escaped him, torn from a place deeper than shame.
A shadow fell over him, blocking the light. He looked up.
Keke’s face filled the sky, her features softened by the distance but still impossibly large. Her warm brown eyes were focused on him with an expression of delighted ownership. She was smiling.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she cooed, her voice a resonant, room-filling melody. “Did you have good dreams?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was a dry rasp. He cleared his throat, a tiny sound. “Keke. Please. Take this off.” He pulled at the collar.
Her smile didn’t falter. “Take what off, baby?”
“This!” he cried, his small voice cracking. “The collar! This is insane. Look at me! Look at what’s happened! We need to think, we need to—”
“Shhh,” she interrupted, a long, manicured finger descending from the heavens. It didn’t touch him, but hovered just above his chest, a polished pink cliff. “You’ll upset yourself. And you don’t want to upset me, do you?”
The threat in her tone was gentle, absolute. He stared at the hovering fingertip, the scale of it leaving him dumbstruck. Her fingerprint was a sprawling, grooved terrain.
“I’m not a pet,” he said, forcing the words out with as much dignity as his squeaking voice could muster. “I’m Cole. I’m your boyfriend. You love me.”
“I do love you,” she said, her finger finally landing, not on him, but on the silk beside his hip. It tapped thoughtfully. “More than anything. That’s why I’m keeping you safe. The world out there would eat you alive, little man. Here, you’re cherished. Here, you have a purpose.”
“A purpose?” he echoed, hysterical laughter bubbling in his throat. “What purpose? Being your fucking living doll?”
“Language,” she chided, her smile finally fading into something sterner. “That’s not how we talk. And yes, a purpose. Companionship. Comfort.” Her eyes darkened. “Pleasure.”
She moved then, her hands entering his field of view. They were careful, monstrously graceful. Her fingers closed around the edges of the silk handkerchief he lay on, and he was lifted, the world tilting and swaying. He gripped the fabric, his heart hammering against his ribs as she carried him across a dizzying expanse of open air. He caught glimpses of a huge room, of distant furniture, of the blinding windows showing a slice of indifferent sky.
She set the silk down on a smooth, cool surface. He scrambled to his knees, looking around.
He was in a cage. A beautiful, horrifying cage. The walls were clear, seamless glass, reinforced with thin wires. The floor was a warm, brushed steel tile. One side had a complex-looking water bottle with a metal spout. In the center was a large, silent wheel with broad, plastic treads. In the corner was a sleek, miniature platform that resembled a loft bed, complete with a tiny, padded mat. It was a high-end rodent habitat, repurposed. A gilded prison.
“I had it customized,” Keke said, her voice coming from above and beyond the glass. He looked up. She was seated in a chair beside the cage, leaning her elbows on the table it sat upon, her face level with the enclosure. She looked like a visitor at a zoo. “Climate controlled. Hepa-filtered air. The best. Nothing but the best for my Cole.”
He stood, walking to the glass wall. He placed his hands against it. It was flawless, unscalable. He looked up at her. “Let me out.”
“Out where?” she asked, genuinely curious. “The apartment isn’t safe for you. A draft could blow you away. A misplaced step….” She shook her head slowly. “No. This is your home now. Until I take you out.”
“Keke, listen to me!” he shouted, slapping his palms against the glass. It made a pathetic, muffled tapping. “You have to fight this! This isn’t you! The virus, the stress—it’s making you think crazy things! We’re a team!”
She watched him rant, her head tilted. When he paused, breathing heavily, she spoke softly. “We are a team. I’m the owner. You’re the pet. That’s a very clear team structure. It works.” She reached for something beside her chair and brought it into view: a long, thin stick made of polished bamboo, with a soft, fluffy white tip. A teasing wand, for cats.
She slid it through a narrow gap near the top of the cage. The fluffy end drifted down, swaying, until it hovered just in front of his face.
“Here,” she said, wiggling the stick gently. “Play.”
He stared at the fluffy white ball, bigger than his head. Rage, hot and desperate, erupted in him. He lunged forward, not to play, but to grab the stick, to try and wrench it from her grip, to show her he still had hands, will, anger.
He caught the slender bamboo shaft just below the fluffy tip. He pulled with all his might.
From her perspective, it was a slight tug. She giggled. “Feisty today!” With a tiny, effortless flick of her wrist, she whipped the stick upward.
Cole’s grip was torn loose. He was flung backwards, tumbling across the smooth steel floor, coming to a stop against the far wall, dazed. The impact wasn’t hard, but the helplessness was a physical blow.
Before he could move, the cage door, a small, perfectly crafted rectangle of glass and steel, swung open with a soft click. Her hand entered his world.
It moved with slow, inevitable purpose, bypassing the fluff wand, her fingers seeking him directly. He tried to scramble away, but there was nowhere to go. Her thumb and forefinger closed around his torso, pinning his arms to his sides, and lifted him.
He was brought out into the open air of the room. The scale was even more devastating here. The ceiling was a distant, white plane. Her chair was a monolithic structure. She held him before her face, her breath a warm, moist wind.
“You need to learn,” she said, her voice low and firm. “The sooner you accept this, the happier you’ll be. Fighting me just wastes your energy. And mine.”
She carried him away from the cage, across the vast living room. He saw their old life whizzing by in monumental flashes: the colossal leather sofa, the towering legs of the glass coffee table, a single discarded magazine that looked like a fallen billboard.
She entered the bedroom—their old bedroom, now just her bedroom. The secure suite. She walked to the bed, the padded platform, and lay down on her back. She placed him not on the bed, but on her stomach, just below her ribcage.
He stood unsteadily on the soft landscape of her shirt-covered abdomen. She was a hill, breathing slowly. Her hands came up, but not to touch him. She laced her fingers behind her head, watching him from beneath half-lidded eyes.
“You used to love this view,” she murmured. “When you were big. You’d lie between my legs and just stare up at me. Said I was a goddess.”
He was silent, trembling.
“I still am,” she said. “You’re just closer to the altar now.”
With her free hand, she slowly pulled the hem of her shirt up, exposing her stomach, then the lace band of her panties. She hooked her thumbs in them and slid them down her hips, past her thighs, and off, kicking them aside. She was naked from the waist down. She spread her legs, bending her knees, planting her feet flat on the bed.
The apex of her thighs was now a yawning, shadowed canyon directly below him. The scent of her, musky and intimate, rose up, engulfing him.
“You see?” she said. “Everything you ever wanted. Right there. Yours to worship. Forever.”
“Don’t do this,” he whispered.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said, a hard edge entering her voice. “You are. You’re going to worship me. The way you should. The way you need to. Or you can go back in the cage and think about why you’re being so ungrateful.”
The choice was no choice. The cage was a silent, sterile hell. This, as horrifying as it was, was at least a connection to her, to the past. It was a perverse shred of intimacy.
With legs that felt like water, he began to walk down the slope of her stomach. Her skin was warm and smooth under his bare feet. Each step brought the dense, curly hair of her pubis into closer view, a dark, vast thicket. The humid heat radiating from her core intensified.
He reached the summit of her mons. Below him, her folds glistened, a labyrinth of deep pink and wet shadow. The scale was incomprehensible. A single inner lip was wider than his entire body.
“Go on,” her voice rumbled through the flesh beneath him, a tectonic command.
He knelt. The scent was overpowering. He leaned forward, extending his tiny tongue, and touched the gleaming surface.
It was like trying to taste an ocean. He licked, a miniscule stripe on a colossal landscape. A low, approving groan vibrated through the world. Encouraged by the sound—a ghost of the pleasure he used to give—he pressed his face closer, trying to find a rhythm, to find a way to matter.
His tiny tongue probed, searching for the sensitive nub he knew was buried somewhere in the architecture above. He found a swelling fold and focused there, licking and suckling with desperate concentration.
Keke’s breath hitched. Her hands came down from behind her head. One settled on the bed beside her hip, gripping the sheets. The other descended toward him.
Her fingers didn’t push him. They framed him. Her thumb and index finger formed a loose circle around the entire area where he worked, not touching him, but caging him in a ring of warm, living flesh. He was a small creature servicing a giant, trapped in a pink arena of her making.
“Right there,” she moaned, her voice thick. “Oh fuck, that’s it. Just like that, you perfect little thing.”
Her hips gave a subtle, rolling shift. The world moved. The folds around him swelled and pressed closer. A droplet of sweat fell from her brow. Her temperature was raised and then she gave a deep sneeze
The sneeze was a convulsive explosion that ripped through her body. Cole was flung from his perch, a tiny projectile tossed into the air as Keke’s stomach clenched violently beneath him. He landed in the tangled sheets, disoriented, the colossal echo of the sneeze still vibrating in the air.
“Shit,” Keke muttered, her voice suddenly thick. She brought a hand to her forehead, her earlier arousal evaporating as a sudden, deep chill shuddered through her frame. “What the hell?”
Cole pushed himself up, watching her. He saw the sheen of fresh sweat on her upper lip, the way her eyes lost their predatory focus, clouding with a familiar, unnerved discomfort. A grim, sickening hope flickered in his chest. He knew this feeling.
“Keke?” he called, his voice still small, but edged with something new.
“Quiet,” she snapped, but the command lacked its usual force. She tried to sit up, then slumped back with a groan. A wave of dizziness washed over her, making the colossal room tilt. “It’s just a… a head rush. From the… the heat.”
But even as she said it, she felt it. That subtle, internal tension. A squeezing sensation deep in her marrow. It was a ghost of what she’d watched consume Cole, but she recognized it instantly. Her lawyer’s mind, so sharp at assessing risk, finally connected the feverish client at The Hollow, Cole’s collapse, the shared sweat-soaked sheets, his desperate mouth on her just now.
“No,” she breathed, the word a punch of air. Her eyes, wide with dawning horror, found his. “No, no, no.”
The compression started in her spine, a series of quiet, popping adjustments. She gasped, her hands flying to her own shoulders as if to hold herself together. “Cole…”
He watched, transfixed, as the woman who had become a giantess began to diminish. The process was faster than his had been, more violent, as if the virus had mutated, learned efficiency. Her form seemed to tighten, to condense. The bed around her, which had been a landscape, began to look normal again, then vast.
Her shirt, once taut against her torso, began to pool. The sleeves slipped over her shrinking hands. She kicked at the sheets, a panicked thrashing, as the world expanded outward in a silent, relentless explosion. The headboard loomed. The ceiling raced away.
“Make it stop!” she shrieked, but her voice was changing, rising in pitch, losing its commanding resonance.
He stood on the rumpled plain of the sheet, the leather collar still absurdly tight around his neck, and watched her world turn inside out. In a matter of moments, the power dynamic that had been carved into his soul with a feather and a collar dissolved geometrically.
Her shrinkage slowed, then ceased with a final, sickening lurch.
Silence descended, broken only by her ragged, high-pitched breathing. She lay on her back, swamped in her own clothing. Where a goddess had been, there was now just a woman. A very small woman.
Cole walked toward her, each step measured. The journey across the sheet that would have been impossible moments ago now took only a dozen paces. He stopped at the edge of the fabric valley created by her shrunken form in the shirt. He looked down at her.
Keke was perhaps ten inches tall. To the rest of the world, she was now property. To him, for the first time in a day, she was someone he could look almost in the eye.
She struggled, pushing the heavy cloth of her shirt away from her face. Her braids were a chaotic mess around her shoulders. Her warm brown eyes, now comically large in her delicate face, were pools of sheer, undisguised terror. She saw him standing there, and for a second, relief flooded her features.
“Cole,” she whimpered, reaching a hand toward him. “Help me. Oh god, help me.”
He didn’t take her hand. He just stared. The collar on his neck felt heavier than ever. He slowly raised his own hands and brought them to the buckle at the back. His fingers, though small, worked with a grim determination. The clasp gave way with a soft snick.
He pulled the leather band from his neck, the tag chiming faintly against the chain, which he left on. He held the collar in his hands, feeling the weight of it. The inside was still warm from his skin.
Keke stared at the collar in his hands, then up at his face. Her relief curdled into confusion, then into a dawning, cold understanding.
Cole took a step closer. He knelt, placing the collar on the sheet between them like an offering. Or a verdict.
His voice, when it came, was quiet, flat, and perfectly clear in the new, intimate scale of their world.
“Your turn.”
The word hung in the vast space between them, solid and sharp as the leather now resting on the sheet. Keke’s outstretched hand trembled, then faltered, dropping to the cotton landscape. Her eyes darted from the collar to Cole’s face, searching for the man she’d ridden just hours ago, for the boyfriend she’d debated floor tiles with. She found a stranger sculpted from cold triumph and fresh, festering rage.
“Cole,” she said again, the name a plea now. “You don’t understand. What I did… it was to protect us. To keep you with me!”
“You kept me,” he said, his voice unnervely calm. He took a step closer, his shadow falling over her prone form. “Now I’m keeping you.” He kicked the crumpled lace of her discarded panties. They were a massive, limp tent now. “Get up.”
A violent shiver wracked her tiny frame, part fever, part terror. She pushed against the oppressive weight of her own shirt, struggling to sit up. The world was a terrifying, tilted plane. The bed’s padded surface, once a familiar territory, was now a featureless expanse. She finally stood, swaying, her head barely reaching his collarbone. The scale was a cruel parody of their old life.
He closed the distance in one swift stride. Before she could react, his hands were on her. They weren’t the gentle, encompassing prisons hers had been; they were quick, efficient, and brutal. He grabbed the hem of her oversized shirt and yanked it upwards, over her head, before she could even cry out. She stood naked before him, exposed and shuddering.
“Please,” she whispered, crossing her arms over her chest, a useless gesture.
“Please what?” he asked, tilting his head. The chain around his neck swung, the ‘COLE’ tag glittering. “You never said please to me. You commanded. You owned.” His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, his fingers encircling it completely. He pulled her arm away from her body, forcing her to uncover herself. “Look at you. Not so big now, are you?”
He pulled her closer, his other hand coming up to cup her breast. It was a harsh, examining grip. Her nipple tightened under his thumb, a traitorous response to the overwhelming stimulus. She gasped, a mix of shame and startling, unwanted sensation.
“Stop,” she breathed.
“Make me,” he said, and there was a dark chuckle in it. He pushed her backwards. She stumbled, falling onto the soft padding, and he was on her immediately, his body pinning hers down. His weight was immense, smothering. He wasn’t her giant, but he was her entire world now, heavy and hot and angry.
He didn’t kiss her. He studied her face, her tiny, panicked features, as if memorizing the view from this new angle. Then his mouth descended to her neck, not to kiss, but to bite. The pressure was sharp, claiming. She cried out, and the sound seemed to excite him. His knee shoved her legs apart.
“You remember how this goes,” he muttered against her skin, his breath burning. “You taught me. Performance is mandatory. Gratitude is expected.”
His hand slid down her stomach, fingers rough against her soft skin. They probed between her legs, parting her folds with none of the clinical precision she’d used, only a furious need to dominate. She was dry, tight with fear, but he pushed two fingers inside anyway, a brutal, stretching invasion.
She arched off the bed, a silent scream on her lips. The stretch was obscene, filling her utterly. He worked his fingers, a cruel, sawing motion. “You’re not even wet for me,” he noted, his voice detached. “That’s disrespectful, Keke. After all I just did for you.”
Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes, hot and helpless. Her body, under the dual assault of the virus and his violation, began to betray her. A slickness started, a humiliating physiological response to the relentless friction. He felt it and laughed, a short, ugly sound.
“There it is,” he said. He withdrew his soaking fingers and brought them to his mouth, tasting her with a grim satisfaction. “See? You know your place now.”
He fumbled with his own shorts, pushing them down just enough. His erection sprang free, thick and demanding in this new, reduced scale. He was huge to her now, a terrifying instrument. He positioned himself at her entrance, the broad head pressing insistently against her.
“Look at me,” he commanded, echoing her words from a lifetime ago.
She forced her eyes open. His green eyes, once bright with hope, were like shards of bottle glass, hard and empty. He pushed forward, seating himself inside her in one relentless, tearing thrust.
She couldn’t breathe. The fullness was catastrophic, a radical claiming of her very core. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing rhythm, each drive pounding her smaller body deeper into the mattress. The slapping sound of their connected flesh was a rapid, wet punctuation in the silent room.
“You’re mine,” he grunted with every thrust, the words punctuating the brutal rhythm. “My tiny, fucking pet. My turn to cage you. My turn to fucking use you.”
His hands gripped her hips, his fingers digging into the flesh hard enough to bruise, holding her utterly immobile as he ravaged her. The pleasure for him was clearly secondary to the act of conquest; it was in the power, in the reversal, in the feel of her tight, unwilling body stretched around him. She was a vessel for his rage, a living, breathing testament to his revenge.
Her own body, in its ultimate betrayal, began to coil towards a climax spurred by sheer, overwhelmed sensation. The friction, the deep, punishing contact, the very psychology of her submission, sparked a wildfire in her nerves. A broken sob escaped her as the orgasm ripped through her, a convulsive wave of shame that made her clamp around him violently.
He felt her pulsing inner muscles and hissed, his control fracturing. With three more brutal, jackhammer thrusts, he came, emptying himself inside her with a guttural roar that was more anguish than triumph. He collapsed on top of her, his weight driving the air from her lungs, his sweat dripping onto her face like warm rain.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. He finally pushed himself off, leaving her feeling empty and ravaged, a slick, burning ache between her legs. He stood, pulling his shorts up, looking down at her crumpled form.
She curled onto her side, drawing her knees up, unable to look at him.
The sound of skittering, paired with a low, mechanical hum, broke the silence. It came from the living room. The habitat. The wheel was moving.
Cole’s head snapped toward the sound. A new, cold vigilance sharpened his features. The personal war was momentarily overshadowed by a more primal threat: the environment. Keke heard it too, her lawyer’s mind, even shattered, triggering an assessment of new variables.
Cole walked to the edge of the bed, peering over the cliff of the mattress towards the distant living room floor. He turned back to her, his expression all business.
“Get up,” he said, his voice devoid of the earlier cruelty, now flat and tactical. “We’re not safe here. Something’s in the cage.”