Artsy Fartsy Artemis Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

Whoever it was took one step into his room, and Max's stomach dropped straight through the mattress.

At 6'4" and 240 pounds, Artemis Vasquez was the tallest member of a family that had never once been accused of being small. She looked less like a Vasquez than like a Vasquez someone had drawn from memory in New York—but as the faint, oniony musk of unwashed pits and slept-in flannel drifted down to the bed, she smelled every bit like every other one of Max's step-relatives.

The hallway light cut her into pieces before his brain could put them back together: purple bangs over black roots, green eyes still half-shut from the guest room, a septum ring catching the light, and a sleep-wrinkled flannel hanging open over a black sports bra that was losing a very serious fight. From down on the pillow, her legs looked like the columns outside a museum. Her soft gut pushed out over a pair of high-waisted black pants, her hips stretched wide as a doorframe, and behind her, the inherited Vasquez shelf filled the seat of those pants like two bags of wet sand. There was paint on her cuffs, a hair tie around one wrist, and a pair of unlaced Docs planted on the carpet fibers like a couple of parked cars.

She stopped with one boot still on the hall runner and scanned the room: kicked-down covers, laundry mountain, empty chair. No five-foot-eight lump under the blanket. No Max.

Her shoulders dropped.

"Oh, thank God," she muttered.

Then, all at once, the room got noticeably warmer.

PPPPRRRRRRRBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

It went on for a good fifteen seconds—long, wet, and loud enough to bounce off the closet door, and the last of it sputtered out into the seat of her pants like the fabric had lost an argument. At three inches tall, it wasn't background noise. It was weather. A hot, humid front rolled across the navy sheet, thick enough to lean on: sour black beans, cabbage, and oat milk, with last night's joint riding on top like a skunk had crawled into the stew and died happy. His eyes watered. His lungs seized. While Artemis was a lot less loud and proud with her farts than her aunts, cousin or grandmother, she was also the only one of them who'd chosen to supercharge that signature weapons-grade Vasquez digestive system with an all-vegan diet.

Max gagged out loud. And then, to his eternal horror, his tiny cock picked that exact moment to say hello.

"Ugh, finally," Artemis sighed, fanning the seat of her pants with a paint-stained hand. "Co-op chili. I'm never trusting you again."

Then her eyes dropped from pillow height to on the pillow, and the color drained out of her freckles.

"…Max?"

"H-hey," Max coughed. "Morning."

For a moment, the purple-haired giantess just stared at him. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, which did absolutely nothing for the air, stepped inside, and shut the door behind her hard enough to make the latch jump. Max heard the lock click, though he didn't think about what it meant until later.

"What the fuck," she said flatly. Not loud. Just stunned, the way someone might say it about a painting that had gone wrong. "How long have you been there?"

"Long enough."

"Okay." Her ears were going pink. "Okay. So that's… that happened. I was holding that in since I got here. I thought the room was empty."

"I noticed," said Max.

"Right. Yeah. Obviously you noticed." She grimaced. "Sorry. Just… don't move."

She crossed the room in three steps. Every one made the floorboards groan in a way they never had when he was full-sized, and every one brought the lingering cloud a little closer. When she crouched beside the bed, the mattress took her weight like a boat taking a wave, and the whole navy landscape lurched under him. The DualSense slid an inch toward the edge. Max grabbed a fistful of sheet to keep from following it.

Up close, the woman was a landscape. Her freckles ran down her sternum and across the tops of her breasts like spilled sand. Tattoos climbed one side of her ribs and vanished under the band of her bra. When she lifted an arm to push her bangs out of her eyes, a purple tuft of unshaved armpit hair appeared and a fresh, sleep-warm bloom of onion and leftover deodorant washed over him. She tilted her head, studying him with narrowed green eyes, and Max realized she was doing the same thing she did to fruit bowls and nude models: measuring him with her eyes. Proportions. Angles. Light.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Are you hurt?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay." Her eyes flicked down, then right back up to his face, very deliberately. "Sorry. I'm not looking. I mean, I'm looking, but like, at the composition. You're really… small. Like, the scale is insane. If I put a can of Coke next to you, you'd be the figure in the corner of a landscape that tells you how big the mountains are."

"Is that supposed to help?"

"No. I don't know. I'm processing." She pressed both palms over her eyes. "What the fuck, Max."

"I woke up like this."

"On the pillow."

"On the pillow."

She let out a long breath through her teeth. Metal clicked as she shifted: industrial, labret, something at her ear. "Okay. So. I've heard of this. There was a girl in my co-op last semester. She said a friend of a friend ordered some weird chemicals from China, and he was supposed to be back to normal by Monday. Five-ten again. Eating nachos. Complaining about rent." Her mouth flattened. "He wasn't. That was April."

Max's hands went cold on the sheet. "So it's not gonna wear off."

"I don't know. 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, like she'd just remembered the room still smelled like her ass. "But I'm not gonna pretend it's fine, either. That'd be, like, gaslighting you."

"You could just go downstairs." He gestured weakly at the laundry mountain, at the cave under the pillow. "I can hide. You don't have to deal with this."

Artemis looked at him with something between pity and disbelief. "Babe. You're three inches tall."

"I noticed."

"So, no. That's not a boundary I'm gonna respect." She hesitated, then winced. "Okay, that came out wrong. What I mean is—what do you want? Like, right now. What would actually help?"

Max blinked up at her. In eighteen years, he couldn't remember a single member of this family ever asking him that.

"I… don't know," he admitted. "Not to be found by Victoria and Izzy?"

"Valid." She nodded seriously. "Super valid. Okay. Cool. We can work with that. I mean, I think we can work with that. I don't actually know if we can work with that, I'm just saying words because you look scared and I'm—"

Knock knock knock.

Three knuckles, right on the other side of the door. The pine carried it into the mattress, and Max felt every one of them through the sheet. He knew that rhythm. So did Artemis.

"Artemis?" Victoria's voice was helicopter-bright and already a little impatient. A thread of berry perfume slipped in under the door and mixed horribly with the chili. "Is he up? I sent you up here five minutes ago. The food's getting cold. Max needs to eat something before he sleeps through the whole day."

The knob turned. Then it stopped cold against the lock.

"One second!" Artemis said, way too fast.

"Why is this locked?"

The plan dropped out of the tall artist's face like a glass. Then she lunged.

Her hand closed around him in a rush of heat and paint-stained skin, hard enough to punch the air out of his lungs. The room yanked sideways, posters smearing into a blur, and then the flannel closed over him and she was stuffing him straight down the front of her sports bra like a phone she wasn't supposed to have out in class.

Elastic scraped over his back. Then heat and soft, heavy weight sealed over him, and she clamped her palm flat over the outside of the left cup.

His whole world shrank to the inside of Artemis Vasquez's bra. Her breast filled the cup the way a hillside fills a tent: soft, heavy, and impossible to argue with, the fabric stretched so tight that he could feel the grain of a freckle against his cheek. Overnight sweat had filmed the crease. The deodorant was losing. Underneath it all, trapped under the flannel, the chili was still hanging around, so that he was breathing her from both directions. Her heartbeat slammed into his face like a washing machine on an uneven floor.

He got hard again. Of course he did.

"He's in the bathroom," Artemis told the door, in a voice that was bright and totally wrong. "Give him a sec. He looks like shit."

"Language," said Victoria automatically. The knob rattled again. "Why would he lock his door if he's in the bathroom?"

"I locked it. He's—he's not decent. He asked me to."

A long pause. Max could hear Victoria deciding whether that was a good enough story, and every second of it happened with his face mashed against the underside of Artemis's boob.

"Is he sick?"

"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, which crushed him even deeper into the cup. "Just give him a minute. We'll be down."

Another pause. Max counted it out by her heartbeat.

"Five minutes," said Victoria. "If he's not at the table by then, I'm coming back up with the key."

The sandals retreated. The old hallway board popped. The stairs started taking her weight.

Artemis didn't move, and neither did Max.

Then, very quietly, she said, "Fuck."

Her hand came off the cup. Light cracked in down the neckline, and suddenly she was peering down into her own bra with her bangs hanging in her eyes, wild with shock. Max looked up past the red line of elastic biting into her skin, close enough to count her pores. 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 everything.

"Hi," Artemis whispered.

"Hey," Max said, into her bra.

She went pink to the tips of her ears, which made all the metal in them look suddenly very teenage. "Okay. Sorry. That was—I didn't ask. I should've asked. I just grabbed you. That's, like, the opposite of consent. Are you okay? Can I… check in?"

"You can put me back on the bed," said Max, his voice cracking.

Artemis hooked a finger in the edge of the cup and started to lift him out. She got as far as shifting the weight of her breast off his legs before they both froze. There was no way to finish the motion without handling him, and handling him meant touching all of that on purpose.

She put him back.

Not on the pillow. Back in the cup, carefully, as if it were neutral territory where nobody had to talk about anything. Then she loosened the fabric with two fingers, just enough that he could breathe real air and see her face.

"Stay there," she said to a spot somewhere over his head. "For a sec. I need to think, and I can't think with you on the bed looking at me like that. And I sit when I think. If I put you in a sock, I will forget the sock."

"Fair," said Max weakly.

"Abuela has this thing she says." She closed her eyes. "'All this culo isn't just for show.' I didn't think she meant, like… weaponized. In a bedroom. At eight in the morning." A beat. "I'm gonna stop talking."

From downstairs came a spatula scraping a pan, and Victoria calling his name. Four minutes left, maybe less.

Artemis opened her eyes and looked down at him for a long time. It was the same look she'd given him from the edge of the bed: studying the figure, working out how it fit into the frame. Then something in her face settled.

"Okay," she breathed. "Okay. So, babe—uh, Max. Dude. I've got, like, two ideas. And honestly, both of them aren't great."

Max gulped. "How bad are the ideas?"

Artemis grimaced. "On a scale from one to Izzy?"