Not a Thursday Thing Shrunken First Semester chapter 4 by maximally

The five-minute food coma lasted two and a half hours.

 

By the time Max woke up, the window over Daisy’s desk had gone from orange to navy to full January dark, and the only light in the room came from the dying blue glow of her laptop and the string of half-burnt-out fairy lights tacked crookedly over the bed. He was still exactly where he’d fallen asleep: wedged in the deep, warm valley of Daisy’s cleavage, one cheek mashed into the warm, heavy curve of her left boob, rising and falling on her slow breathing like a tiny boat on a very large, very sleepy ocean.

 

What had changed was the view.

 

At some point, Hazel had rolled off Daisy and onto her back, and now she lay half-across the bed and half-across Daisy, one polka-dot leg slung over Daisy’s thigh, one arm flung up over her own face, her glasses knocked so crooked on her nose that one lens was basically on her forehead. Her striped blouse had come untucked and climbed up over a soft, pale-olive belly that rose like a hill a foot from his face. Her mouth was open. Her buck teeth were out. She was snoring like a leaf blower.

 

Then her phone went off.

 

It was the loudest alarm Max had ever heard. It sounded like an air raid siren and a fire truck having an argument, and Hazel shot bolt upright so fast that the whole mattress launched Daisy six inches into the air and Max a foot higher than that.

 

“I’M UP! I’M UP!” Hazel slapped blindly at her phone. “WHAT?! WHO DIED?!”

 

“Nobody died!” Daisy squeaked, catching Max out of midair with both hands like a fumbled football.

 

“Oh.” Hazel squinted at the screen, shoved her glasses back where they belonged, and read it. Her face did something fast and unreadable. Then it went back to normal so quickly that Max almost thought he’d imagined it. “Oh, right. Cool. Yeah. So, uh.” She cleared her throat. “Can I crash here tonight?”

 

“Why can’t you sleep in your room?” Max asked.

 

“Because I’ve got something cooking in there that you’re really not supposed to breathe for, like, eight hours.” Hazel said it the same way someone else might say I left the oven on. “It’s fine! It’s totally fine. It’s off-gassing. That’s a normal science word.”

 

Daisy’s eyes went wide. “Is it dangerous?”

 

“Only if you’re a carbon-based life form.” Hazel grinned, buck teeth glinting in the fairy lights. “So? Sleepover? I know it’s not Thursday. I’m not asking for a Thursday. I’m asking for a Monday. Mondays are, like, a totally separate jurisdiction.”

 

Max looked up at Daisy. Daisy looked down at Max. He could tell from the little crease between her eyebrows that she was asking him, the way she always did, even about tiny things. He gave her a thumbs-up.

 

“Okay,” Daisy said. Then, a little pinker: “You can stay.”

 

“Yes.” Hazel punched the air. “Best. Landlord. Ever.”

 

Daisy’s bed was two mattresses shoved together into a makeshift king. This had never been a problem for Max, who took up roughly as much of it as a contact lens. It had occasionally been a problem for Daisy, who at 6’4” and 375 pounds took up every square inch of it and then some, and whose butt had long ago carved a permanent crater into the middle of the seam that Hazel called “the Buttzilla Basin.”

 

Adding Hazel was a geometry problem.

 

“Okay, okay, okay,” Hazel announced, standing at the foot of the bed fists planted on her hips like a general surveying a battlefield. “If you lie on your side, and I lie on my side, and we both kind of breathe out at the same time—”

 

“That’s not how breathing works,” Max said.

 

“Shut up, Miniguy, you’re three inches, you don’t get a vote on space allocation.”

 

They tried it Hazel’s way first. Daisy lay on her side facing the wall, with Max tucked into her cleavage. Hazel lay down behind her, fit her front to Daisy’s back like a big spoon, and then immediately slid right off the mattress and hit the floor with a thud that knocked a Mountain Dew can off the nightstand.

 

“…I’m okay!”

 

They tried it the other way. Hazel against the wall, Daisy on the outside. That lasted about ten seconds, until Daisy shifted her hips and Hazel got pinned flat against the drywall by a full, slow-motion wave of Buttzilla.

 

“Mmmf!” Hazel’s voice came out muffled and delighted. “Okay! Okay! Not complaining! But I can’t feel my left arm!”

 

In the end, they settled on the only arrangement physics allowed: Daisy flat on her back in the Basin, and Hazel half on top of her, half on the wall side, one leg hooked over Daisy’s thigh and her head on Daisy’s shoulder. Max relocated to the high ground: the broad, soft summit of Daisy’s belly, right where the hem of her hoodie rode up, with the laptop propped on her chest above him like a drive-in movie screen.

 

“Now,” Hazel said, reaching across both of them to grab the trackpad, “we watch ponies.”

 

They made it four episodes in before the trouble started.

 

Daisy started it, though not on purpose. It was the chana masala from the night before, finally catching up with the nuggets she’d put on top of it, and Max felt it coming the way you feel a train through a subway platform: a long, deep rumble under his whole body, rising up through the soft hill of her belly beneath him.

 

“Oh no,” Daisy whispered. “Oh no, oh no—”

 

 

It came out under the blanket like a cello being played by a truck. The mattress buzzed. The blanket rose an inch at the foot of the bed and settled back down. Then the smell came crawling up from underneath: chana masala first, rich and spiced and very much not done with anybody yet. Then fried breading and honey mustard, nugget grease gone sour in the dark. Then the deep, warm, earthy Daisy undertone Max had stopped noticing sometime around Thanksgiving, which meant it had to be really bad for him to notice it now.

 

“S-sorry,” Daisy squeaked.

 

Hazel lifted her head off Daisy’s shoulder very, very slowly.

 

“D,” she said solemnly. “That was a masterpiece.”

 

“It was not—”

 

“It was. That was museum-grade. That needs a plaque.” She turned to Max with a look of pure scientific hunger. “Miniguy. You’re the closest instrument. Rate it.”

 

“Rate it?”

 

“One to ten. For science.” Hazel’s eyes were glinting. “And then I’m gonna beat it.”

 

“Hazel, no—” Daisy started.

 

Too late. Hazel had already shifted her weight onto one elbow, cocked one hip up off the mattress, and screwed up her face in total concentration like a weightlifter going for a record.

 

“Takis,” she announced through her teeth, “plus two Baja Blasts, plus Red Bull, plus Daisy’s leftover Indian food I’m not supposed to know about. Watch this.”

 

 

It was louder than Daisy’s. It was also, Max discovered half a second later, aimed. Hazel had lifted the blanket on her side with her free hand at the exact right moment, and the whole cloud funneled in under it and rolled across the Basin like a flash flood toward the high ground of Daisy’s belly. Toward him.

 

It hit him dead on. Chili-lime chemical burn first, so sharp it stung the inside of his nose. Then the syrupy, fake-tropical sweetness of Baja Blast, which somehow made everything worse. And then, underneath, the thick, ripe, unmistakable Hazel funk Kali had once famously described to the whole Juno house as “a crime scene in a sauna.”

 

Max’s eyes watered so hard the ponies went blurry. He doubled over on Daisy’s belly, coughing.

 

“Ha! Look at him!” Hazel crowed. “He’s crying! That’s a ten, baby! Miniguy, is that a ten?!”

 

“Seven,” Max wheezed. “Daisy’s was a nine.”

 

“Seven?!” Hazel looked genuinely betrayed. “Okay, no. No. That’s a calibration error. Your instrument is broken.” She rolled up onto one elbow and loomed over Daisy’s belly, glasses glinting, until her whole face filled Max’s sky. “I demand a rematch. Different event.”

 

“What event?” Max said.

 

Hazel didn’t answer him. She looked at Daisy instead. And she didn’t say anything at all, which for Hazel was louder than shouting. Then she leaned down and kissed Daisy’s neck, right under the jaw, slow and wet and deliberate.

 

Daisy’s breath hitched. The belly under Max went tight, then soft. A long, shaky little sigh came out of her that he felt more than heard.

 

“Hazel,” she whispered. “It’s Monday.”

 

“I know,” Hazel murmured against her skin. “I said separate jurisdiction. Different laws.” She kissed her again, lower. “Tell me to stop and I’ll go sleep in the hallway. Swear to God.”

 

Daisy didn’t tell her to stop. Instead, she looked down past the laptop, over the pale slope of her own chest, all the way down to the tiny naked guy sitting on her stomach. And even with her face going red to the ears and Hazel’s mouth working at her collarbone, she asked him, the way she always did.

 

“Max? Is… is this okay?”

 

Max thought about the November PowerPoint. About the ground rules. About the fact that the two people in this bed were, without any question, his two favorite people at Ventus, and both of them were currently looking at him like he was in charge.

 

“Yeah,” he said. “More than okay.”

 

“Oh, thank God.” Hazel flopped over backwards so hard the bed bounced. “I have been so horny since the nuggets. You know what twenty pieces of chicken does to a girl’s hormones?! I did the math on that too!” She was already yanking her striped blouse over her head without bothering with the buttons. “Pause the ponies.”

 

Max had seen both of them naked plenty of times by now. It didn’t matter. It never mattered. From three inches, every single time was the first time.

 

Daisy sat up, peeled the Proserpina hoodie over her head and shoved the sweatpants down her legs with a groan, and the whole landscape of her came free at once. Her breasts dropped like a pair of wrecking balls, heavy and pale and flushed pink at the top, each nipple as wide as a dinner plate from where he stood. Her belly rolled out over her thighs in a soft, freckled hill. And when she lay back down into the Basin, the thick dark curls between her legs parted on a pussy already swollen and glistening in the fairy lights, and the smell rose off her in a warm, heavy wave: sweat, musk, and the deep, sweet, brackish scent of Daisy turned on, which no amount of chana masala had ever managed to cover.

 

Hazel was the opposite shape: smaller up top, heavier in the hips, plump and olive and freckled with acne across her shoulders, with a wide, soft belly and a big round ass that spilled out of the polka-dot sweatpants the second she shoved them down. She kicked them across the room. One landed on the lamp.

 

“Okay,” Hazel announced, kneeling between Daisy’s thighs and cracking her knuckles. “Procedure. Miniguy’s best quality—no offense—is that he is exactly clit-sized.”

 

“Hazel—”

 

“D, trust the science.”

 

She plucked Max off Daisy’s belly between two sticky fingers, carried him down over the soft swell of Daisy’s stomach, through the curls, and set him on his knees right at the top of Daisy’s slit. The heat hit him first, like opening an oven. Then the wet. Daisy’s clit stood up from its hood in front of him, flushed and slick and as big as his head, and when Hazel’s fingertip nudged him forward and his chest pressed against it, Daisy’s whole body jolted hard enough to bounce him an inch into the air.

 

“Ohhh—”

 

“See?” Hazel crowed. “Science!”

 

Max hugged it with both arms and hung on.

 

He knew this part. He’d had all fall to learn it. Daisy liked slow at first, his whole body rocking up and down against her, cheek pressed to the hood, and then faster once her thighs started shaking. He kissed it. He rubbed it with his chest and his stomach. He ground his own aching little cock against the slick skin just below it, and every time he did, Daisy let out a high, helpless whimper that rolled down through her whole body and buzzed in his teeth. Her juices ran down around his knees, hot and slippery, until he was kneeling in a puddle of her.

 

Then Hazel’s tongue arrived.

 

It came up from below like a pink, wet tidal wave, broad and hot and rough, licking up the full length of Daisy’s slit and right over Max at the top of the stroke. It bowled him flat against Daisy’s clit and dragged across his back and the backs of his thighs. Her breath washed over him, Takis and Baja Blast, and her buck teeth bumped his hip. He had about a second to gasp before the next lick came.

 

“Mmmph,” Hazel moaned straight into Daisy. “Two-for-one.”

 

Daisy grabbed the sheets in both fists. “H-Hazel—Max—oh my God—”

 

They found a rhythm. Hazel licked, long and slow, and Max worked the clit between strokes, and every lick swept him into Daisy a little harder until he couldn’t tell where Hazel’s tongue ended and Daisy’s pussy began. It was all heat and slick and taste: salty, musky, sweet, sour, endless. Daisy’s thighs started to tremble on either side of them like a pair of buildings in an earthquake. Her belly heaved. Her moans went higher, and higher, and broke.

 

She came with a long, cracked, wailing sob. Her thighs slammed shut around Hazel’s head. Her clit pulsed against Max’s chest like a heartbeat. A hot flood of wetness gushed down over both of them. And, because it was Daisy, because it was always Daisy, the orgasm knocked something loose further back.

 

 

It ripped out into the mattress right under Hazel’s chin. Hazel didn’t even flinch. She just moaned louder, muffled between Daisy’s thighs, like it was a prize.

 

“Sorry,” Daisy whimpered, still shaking. “Sorry, sorry—”

 

“Ten,” Hazel gasped when the thighs finally let her go. Her face was soaked, her glasses fogged solid, her grin enormous. “That was a ten, Miniguy, don’t you dare give me a seven—”

 

“Ten,” Max agreed, lying flat on his back in a puddle on Daisy’s mound, too wrung out to argue.

 

“My turn,” Hazel said. “Please tell me it’s my turn.”

 

It was her turn.

 

Daisy took over the logistics, which meant she sat up, shaky and pink, and guided Hazel onto her back in the Basin with one big hand flat on her chest. Then she picked Max up off her own mound, very gently, wiped him off on the sheet, and kissed him. Her whole mouth, soft and swollen, covered him from his chest to his knees. “Thank you,” she whispered against him, which was the most Daisy thing anyone had ever said during sex. Then she set him down on Hazel.

 

Hazel’s pussy was a whole different country. It sat lower and fleshier, wrapped in thick dark hair, hot as a sauna and smelling stronger and sharper than Daisy’s, ripe with two days of not showering and an afternoon of gooning she’d been very open about. Her clit was smaller, harder, and twitchy as a live wire. The second Max touched it, her hips bucked off the mattress and launched him right into the curls.

 

“Fuck! Sorry! Sorry!” Hazel yelped. “Sensitive! I’m sensitive! I’ve been edging since nine a.m.!”

 

Daisy, very calmly, laid one huge hand across Hazel’s hips and pinned them flat. Then she set Max back where he belonged, lay down beside Hazel, and closed her lips around one of Hazel’s nipples.

 

What came out of Hazel was not a word in any language.

 

Max rode her clit like a mechanical bull. Hazel bucked and squirmed and swore under Daisy’s hand, her thighs flapping open and shut on either side of him like a pair of doors in a windstorm, her juices running hot and slick and sharp-smelling down his legs. Above them, Daisy worked from nipple to nipple, sucking and licking. And Hazel narrated the entire thing at full volume, the way she narrated everything.

 

“Oh my god. D. D, your mouth. Miniguy, left—left—no, your other left—yes. Yes. Yes, that’s it, keep doing that, don’t you dare stop, this is going in the ledger, this is going in the ledger in pen—”

 

She came in about four minutes, screaming loudly enough that somebody down the hall banged on a wall. Her hips tore loose from Daisy’s hand and launched Max straight into the air one last time, and he landed belly-first on her soft, heaving stomach, slick from head to toe, just in time to hear the encore.

 

 

Takis. Baja Blast. Hazel. All three, at once, rising up from under her and rolling right over him across the hill of her belly.

 

“…Okay,” Hazel panted at the ceiling. “That one’s a ten.”

 

“Nine,” said Max.

 

“Fuck you,” Hazel said, with enormous affection.

 

Then the two of them looked at each other across the pillow, and then down at him, and Max realized with a sudden full-body flush that he was the only person in the bed who hadn’t finished.

 

“Oh,” Daisy said softly, and smiled.

 

They did it together. Daisy lay on her side facing Hazel, and Hazel lay on her side facing Daisy, and they set him on the mattress between them, in the narrow warm gap where their bellies almost touched. Then the two of them leaned in and kissed, slow and sloppy, with Max right underneath it. Two pairs of lips met above him and came down over him at once, Daisy’s soft and Hazel’s buck-toothed and grinning, two tongues licking around him and over him and between them, two different breaths, two different tastes. A fingertip, he never found out whose, found his cock and stroked it, very gently, from base to tip.

 

He lasted maybe thirty seconds. He came with a squeak that both of them felt more than heard, all over the sheet and somebody’s fingertip, and his whole body went limp in the hot, wet, giggling pocket between their mouths.

 

“Aww,” Hazel said. “Look at him.”

 

“Shh,” Daisy said, and gathered him up, and put him back where he lived.

 

The room reeked. Sex, sweat, two different brands of fart, and the cheap vanilla candle Daisy lit afterward, which made no difference at all. Hazel’s sweatpants were still hanging off the lamp.

 

Daisy fell asleep first. She always did. Her breathing went slow and deep, and her snore started up: a soft, low, rhythmic purr like a huge, contented cat. Max lay in the warm dark of her cleavage, sticky and boneless and happier than he could remember being.

 

He thought Hazel was asleep too. Then he noticed the glow.

 

She was lying on her side against the wall, naked, sheet kicked down around her knees, with her cheek on Daisy’s shoulder and her phone held close to her face at its lowest brightness. The light lit her glasses up from underneath. She wasn’t scrolling. She was just reading something, over and over, her thumb not moving.

 

“Hazel?” Max whispered.

 

The phone flipped face-down against the blanket so fast it made a snap.

 

“Jeez, Miniguy.” She said it quietly. No volume. He almost didn’t recognize her voice that quiet. “Warn a girl.”

 

“Sorry. You okay?”

 

“Yeah. Totally. Just…” She waved the phone vaguely. “Checking on my thing.”

 

“The off-gassing thing.”

 

“The off-gassing thing.” She was quiet for a while. Daisy snored softly between them, a long, low, sleepy rumble that Max felt through his whole body. Then Hazel said, still in that small, flat, quiet voice, “Hey. At lunch. Did you mean it?”

 

Max thought about it. About the coffee table, and the dream, and the nugget.

 

“Yeah,” he said. “I meant it.”

 

“Cool.” She nodded against Daisy’s shoulder. “Good. That’s… yeah. Good.” She glanced down, not at him, but at Daisy’s sleeping face, with its soft, round cheeks and its little crease between the eyebrows that never quite went away even when she was dreaming. Hazel looked at it for one second longer than she needed to, then another, and then she looked away like she’d caught herself doing something. “She’s happy, you know. Like, actually happy. We've been neighbors for two years, and I’ve never seen her like this.”

 

“I know,” Max said.

 

“So, don’t screw it up?”

 

“I won’t.”

 

“Cool.” Some of the volume came back, just a little. “Night, Miniguy.”

 

“Night, Hazel.”

 

He woke up at what had to be three in the morning to a problem he had never prepared for.

 

Somewhere in the night, Hazel had rolled. Her arm, which was not small, had crossed over Daisy’s chest, and her hand, which was even less small, had gone wandering in its sleep. And it had found him.

 

It closed around him the way a sleeping person grabs a pillow: soft, warm, absolutely unstoppable. He went up out of the cleavage in one smooth, sleepy swoop, then sideways, then down, and before he could even yell he’d been tucked into the hottest, dampest, most horrifying place he had ever been, which was saying something.

 

Hazel’s armpit.

 

Her arm clamped down. The world became soft, pale, sweaty skin on every side, unshaven stubble scraping his back like the bristles of a doormat, the soft weight of her bare arm sealing the whole thing in like plastic wrap. The smell had layers, and all of them were angry: two days of deodorant she’d clearly forgotten to reapply, energy-drink sweat, the salty leftover sting of sex, and a deep, oniony, living funk that seemed to have its own pulse.

 

“Mmmnn,” Hazel mumbled happily in her sleep. “Squishy.”

 

“HAZEL!” Max squeaked into her ribs. “HAZEL, I’M NOT A STRESS BALL!”

 

“Five more minutes, Mom,” Hazel murmured, and squeezed.

 

It took Daisy three full minutes to wake up, two more to figure out where the squeaking was coming from, and one very careful, very gentle, very red-faced extraction involving both her hands and an apology to a sleeping person who didn’t hear any of it. When Max finally landed back in her cleavage, slick and gasping and smelling like a high school locker room, Daisy cupped both hands over him like a shield and glared at Hazel’s sleeping face with an expression he had never seen on her before.

 

“Mine,” Daisy whispered, very quietly, to nobody.

 

Max kept quiet. He lay there in the warm dark, breathing her in, feeling her heart going a little fast against his back, and grinned.

 

When he woke up again, it was light, the bed was half-empty, and Hazel was gone.

 

The wall side of the mattress was still warm. On top of the closed laptop sat a bright yellow sticky note, covered in Hazel’s frantic, slanted, all-caps handwriting, with a crude drawing of a chicken nugget wearing sunglasses in the corner.

 

 

 

 

Daisy read it twice over his head, still half-asleep, and frowned at the wall. On the other side, Max could hear something he’d never heard from Hazel’s room in all the months he’d lived here.

 

Silence.

 

No music. No anime. No gooning. Just, faintly, if he held his breath, the soft, steady hum of some kind of machine.

 

Beside the laptop, Daisy’s phone sat face-down right where she’d left it. Max could see the edge of the screen glowing. There were at least three new notifications, and he didn’t have to look to know who they were from.