Artsy Fartsy Artemis Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

Whoever it was took one step into his room.

The hallway light cut her into pieces before his brain caught up: purple bangs first, black roots underneath, then the rest of her filling the frame the way only the tall ones in this family did. Six feet and four inches of unmistakable Vasquez curves in a sleep-wrinkled flannel and a black sports bra, unlaced Docs on the carpet fibers, septum ring catching the hall light like a small mistake. Paint on the cuff. A hair tie around her wrist. Green eyes still half-narrowed from the guest room. Soft gut pushing the open flannel. High-waisted black pants already losing to her hips.

Not Victoria.  
Not Izzy.  
Artemis.

She stopped with one boot still on the hall runner and swept the bed: kicked-down covers, pillow, laundry on the chair. No five-foot-eight lump. No Max.

Her shoulders dropped.

“Oh, thank God,” she muttered, to nobody, and let go.

It started as a little unclench, the kind you steal when the hallway is finally empty, but it didn't end there.

ppprrrRRRbbblllaaaaattttt

Wet. Long. The sound hit the closet door and came back. At three inches it wasn’t background. It was a warm front shoving across the navy sheet, thick enough to lean on. Heat first, then humidity, then the smell arriving in layers: sour-sweet beans, cabbage, oat milk, last night’s joint riding the back of it like a skunk had crawled into the stew and died happy. It pushed into his mouth before he’d sat up. It clung to his tongue. It got in his eyes. The air went close and personal in a single breath, and his stomach turned, and something lower turned with it, traitorous and immediate, like his body had voted before he had.

Max gagged on it. The sound he made was mostly lungs.

Relief hit her face first. Then the giggle she always got when her body was funny and nobody was supposed to be there to grade it. Then her eyes dropped from pillow-height to on the pillow, and the giggle died with a little click of metal.

“Max?”

He was still catching up. The fart was in his hair. It was on his teeth. He was three inches tall and naked on his own pillow with the smell of her ass sitting in the room like a guest, and Artemis Vasquez was staring at the exact square of sheet she’d just used as a bathroom.

“What the fuck.”

It wasn’t loud. It came out flat and stunned, the way she talked when a painting went wrong. She didn’t scream. She clapped a hand over her own mouth, which did nothing for the air, and then she stepped inside and shut the door hard enough that the latch jumped.

The hallway narrowed to a line of light underneath. The smell had nowhere to go. The old AC just pushed it around: across the sheet, into the pillowcase, up the flannel hanging open on her.

“Don’t—” She dropped the hand. “Don’t move. Just. Stay there. I thought you weren’t— I thought the room was empty. I didn’t—”

“I noticed,” Max managed.

His eyes were watering. He tried to sit up. His hands went to cover himself and covered almost nothing. The sheet under him was a field. She was a building that had just farted in his face by accident, and the building was still radiating it.

“Sorry.” Pink was already climbing her ears. “Sorry. That one was— I was holding that in since I got here.” A grimace twisted her mouth. “You weren’t supposed to be there.”

He wanted the floor to open. The floor was carpet fibers the height of his shin.

She crossed it anyway. Each step made the boards complain in a way they never had when he was five-eight. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of her, bearing down. The flannel hung open. The sports bra was doing the honest work underneath: black fabric, wide straps, the soft weight of her filling it without trying. Freckles across her sternum and the tops of her breasts. A navel piercing. Tattoos climbing one side of her ribs and disappearing under the band. The last of it still hung in the warm air between her thighs when she got close. It clung to the cotton. It clung to her.

She crouched.

The mattress took her like a boat taking a wave. The whole bed lurched. Navy sheet jumped. The DualSense slid an inch toward the edge and became a wrecked car at the bottom of a hill. Up close she was gut and hips and the inherited shelf packed into those high-waisted pants, thunder thighs folding as she dropped. The flannel fell open. One arm lifted, revealing a flash of purple armpit hair and a matching bloom of stink, sleep-warm and oniony under leftover deodorant. She pushed the purple bangs from her eyes and the same sour-sweet washed over him in one thick, living breath.

Max’s stomach clenched.

She looked at him like he might blink out if she was rude about it.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Max said. It came out thin. “I can hear you.”

“Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. The hangover throbbed. The smell throbbed with it. “I don’t— I don’t think so.”

She swallowed. He watched her throat work from underneath. “What the fuck, Max.”

“I woke up like this.”

“On the pillow.”

“On the pillow.”

She let out a breath through her teeth. Metal clicked when she shifted: industrial, labret, something at her ear. “I’ve heard of this. There was a girl in my co-op last semester. Said a friend of a friend ordered some weird chemicals from China, and he was supposed to be back by Monday.” Artemis’s mouth flattened. “He wasn’t. That was April. So if this is that shit, I don’t think it fades by lunch.”

Max’s hands went cold on the sheet.

“That’s—”

“I know. That’s a lot. I don’t know who did it and I don’t know how to undo it and I am not a chemist.” She rubbed her face, then froze, remembering her hand on the door, remembering the room still smelled like her. “I need a second. You need to stay on the pillow. I need to not step on you. And I am so sorry about walking in here like that. I really thought I was alone.”

“You could just—” He gestured helplessly at the laundry mountain, at the controller, at the cave under the pillow. The motion made him feel every inch of how naked he was under her shadow. “I can hide. You don’t have to— you can go downstairs. You don’t have to deal with this.”

Artemis’s mouth tightened in a mix of pity and disbelief.

“Max. You’re three inches tall.”

“I noticed.”

“If I leave you on the bed and someone else opens that door—”

A knock cut her off.

Not from the stairs. On the wood, right behind her shoulder. Three knuckles. The pine carried it into the mattress; Max felt the knock in the sheet. Victoria’s rhythm. Berry perfume threaded through the gap under the door and mixed badly with what she’d already put in the air.

“Artemis?” Victoria’s voice, helicopter-bright, already a little impatient. “Is he up? I sent you five minutes ago. The food’s getting cold. Mijo needs to eat something before he sleeps the whole day.”

The knob turned.

She’d shut the door hard when she came in, and he’d heard the click of the lock then—a deliberate sound he hadn’t processed. Now it stopped the knob cold. Her hand was already there, flat on the brass, body braced like the door was a person she could keep out by standing in front of it. When she stood, the mattress sprang back and nearly threw him. The smell of her rose with her, trapped in the closed room, thicker at standing height, rolling down.

“One second,” Artemis said, too fast.

“Why is this locked?”

The plan dropped out of her face like a glass. She lunged.

Her hand closed around him in a rush of heat and paint-stained skin, a grip that punched the air from his lungs. The room yanked sideways, posters smearing into a blur. Then the flannel closed over him, and she was stuffing him down the front of her sports bra like a phone she wasn’t supposed to have out.

Elastic scraped, then heat and soft weight sealed over him. She shoved him deep into the left cup, her palm clamped flat over the outside.

His world compressed to the dark, hot space of Artemis Vasquez.

The bra was still warm from sleep. Her breast filled it the way a hillside fills a tent, soft and heavy and inarguable, the fabric stretched tight enough that he could feel the texture of her skin through it, the faint grain of a freckle, the give of fat over the harder shape underneath. Overnight sweat had filmed the crease. Deodorant was already losing. Underneath that, trapped in the closed flannel, beans and weed and stew held against him by cotton and body heat until he was breathing her from both directions. Her heartbeat hit him in the face. It was enormous. It slammed through flesh and fabric and his ribs like a washer on an uneven floor.

He got hard against the inside of her bra.

It was a stupid, immediate reflex he couldn't stop. The heat did it. The smell did it. Being handled like an object did it. He bit down on a sound and tried to twist sideways and only succeeded in smearing himself along the curve of her, smaller than the seam, stuck to her skin by sweat.

Outside the cotton, Artemis’s voice went bright and wrong.

“He’s in the bathroom,” she said to the door. “Give him a second. He looks like shit.”

“Language,” Victoria said, automatic. The knob tested the lock again. “Why would he lock it if he’s in the bathroom.”

“I locked it. He was— he isn’t decent. He asked me to.”

A pause. Max could hear Victoria deciding whether that was a good enough story. Every second of it happened with his face in the underside of Artemis’s breast.

“Is he sick?”

“He’s hungover.”

“He’s eighteen, Artemis, he doesn’t get to be hungover in this house without me looking at him.”

“Tía.” Artemis leaned into the door. The motion crushed him deeper into the cup. Soft flesh surged around him, humid, inescapable, a whole climate with a pulse. He turned his face into the fabric and tried to breathe through it and got sweat and cotton and the same air with nowhere to vent. “Just— give him a minute. We’ll be down.”

Another pause. Longer. Max counted the seconds by her heart.

“Five minutes,” Victoria said. “If he’s not at the table I’m coming back with a key.”

Footsteps. The old hallway board. The stairs starting to take her weight.

Artemis didn’t move, and neither did he.

Then, very quietly, she said, “Fuck.”

Her hand came off the outside of the cup. Fingers fumbled at the flannel. Light cracked in — not much, just a seam of morning down the neckline — and then she was looking down into her own bra with her bangs hanging in her eyes and an expression of stunned, wild-eyed shock.

Max looked up.

There was no good angle. Her face was a sky. Green eyes. Freckles. The septum ring. The sports bra’s elastic cutting a red line into skin he was close enough to count pores on. The sour-sweet air moved when she breathed; it came down the neckline and sat on his tongue all over again. He was naked against her. He was hard against her. Her eyes took in his face, then flickered down, and he knew she’d seen it all.

“Hi,” Artemis whispered.

It was the worst possible word. It was also, somehow, the only one.

“Hey,” Max said, into her bra.

“Okay.” She stared. She glanced at the torn corner of the Smash print like it had asked her a question, then looked back, because she had to confirm he was in one piece. “That was— I shouldn’t have— she was on the door.”

“You can put me back.”

His voice cracked on 'back.' He tried to cover himself with his hands again. In a sports bra cup it just made him look like he was praying. It also did not hide anything that mattered.

Artemis made a small, helpless sound that wanted to be a laugh and then hated itself.

“Sorry,” she said, just as he said it back. The word hung between them.

The AC pushed the rest of it across the room in a thin, lingering trail. It found the open flannel and came in. Neither of them mentioned it.

Silence opened. She filled it, because the other option was looking at him.

“Abuela has that thing,” she said, to the dresser. “‘All this culo isn’t just for show.’ I didn’t think she meant, like. Weaponized. In a bedroom. At eight in the morning.” She shut her eyes. “I’m going to stop talking.”

Her finger hooked the edge of the cup. She started to lift him out. Got as far as shifting the weight of her own breast off his legs. Skin, then air, then the full mortifying view of him in her palm’s shadow. They both froze, because there was no way to finish that motion without her handling him, and handling him now meant touching all of that on purpose.

Artemis’s ears went pinker. He had never seen that happen before. It made the piercings look suddenly teenage.

She put him back.

Not on the pillow. Back into the cup, carefully, as if it were a neutral space that demanded no conversation. The heat closed over him again. She loosened the fabric with two fingers. Just enough that he could breathe real air and see her face without being poured out.

“Stay,” she said, very carefully, to a point over his head. “For a second. I need to think, and I can’t think if you’re on the bed looking at me like that.”

Downstairs, Victoria called his name. A spatula against a pan. The house going on without them like this was still an ordinary Saturday in July.

Artemis looked at the door.  
Looked at the flannel.  
Did not go down.

Max stayed where she’d put him, three inches tall in his step-cousin’s sports bra, the hangover and the locked door and the fact that this might not fade by lunch all occupying the same narrow space, and waited for her to decide what kind of mistake this was.