Mama V Picks a Number Shrunken First Semester chapter 12 by maximally

Max woke up because he couldn't feel his left arm.

For a few seconds he didn't know where he was. There was heat on every side of him, thick and humid and close, and a dark that wasn't quite dark, more of a deep charcoal glow where light leaked through stretched black cotton. His face was mashed into something that gave when he breathed and didn't when he moved. His arm was trapped under him at a bad angle, pins and needles all the way to the shoulder.

Then the something shifted, and a long, sleepy groan came rolling down through it, and he remembered.

Victoria's ass. Victoria's briefs. All night.

He'd slept. He couldn't believe he'd slept. The last thing he remembered was the headlights crossing the ceiling and the car fading off down the street, and then lying there in the crease of her cheeks, too hot and too wired to close his eyes. And then, apparently, closing them anyway.

Her hand was still there. He could feel the weight of it through the cotton across his back, five fingers spread, heavier now with sleep. At some point in the night she'd rolled a few degrees toward her stomach, and her right cheek had settled more of its weight down onto him, a big soft slab of butt that had pinned his arm under his own ribs. The cotton around him was damp. So was he. The smell in there had cooked all night into something dense and ripe and musky, sweat and skin and cocoa butter gone stale, the private smell of a body that had been asleep under a duvet in July.

He worked his arm free an inch at a time. It took a while. Every time he wriggled, her cheek flexed in her sleep and clamped back down.

Somewhere above him, Victoria smacked her lips and mumbled something in Spanish. Then her phone went off on the nightstand, the same cheerful marimba tone as every morning, and the whole mattress lurched as she rolled onto her back.

He went with her.

For one terrible second, two hundred and fifty pounds of stepmother came down on him flat, and the air shot out of him in a single squeak, and the world went black and starry. Then she gasped, "Ay, mijo!" and rolled right back onto her side so fast the headboard knocked the wall.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry." Her hand found him through the cotton and patted frantically. "Mama forgot. Mama forgot. Are you okay? Wiggle for Mama."

He wiggled. It was mostly a cough.

"Oh, thank God." She flopped back against the pillows, breathing hard, then laughed at herself. "Good morning, sweetie. Did you sleep? Mama slept like a rock."

He knew. He'd been under the rock.

*

She didn't take him out right away. She padded to the bathroom with him still in her briefs, brushed her teeth with him still in there, rocking him gently with every stroke, and splashed her face. Then she went down the hall and knocked on Izzy's door.

"Mija? Breakfast?"

Nothing.

She knocked again, then cracked the door. Max couldn't see anything from where he was, but he heard the hinge and the pause.

"Still asleep," Victoria murmured fondly, and pulled the door shut. "She had such a hard day yesterday. Let her rest."

Max lay in the dark and thought about the way the door had swung open without anybody grumbling at it. Izzy always grumbled. Izzy grumbled at sunlight. And then there was the third stair last night. The car. That laugh in the driveway.

Her bed was empty. He was almost sure of it. Victoria had looked at a lump of blankets and seen a daughter.

He said nothing. There was nothing to say from inside a pair of panties.

Downstairs, Victoria fished him out at last. She held him up over the kitchen sink and inspected him in the morning light, front and back, the way she'd inspect a strawberry for bruises. He was red and creased all down one side, and he smelled like the inside of her underwear, and his hair was plastered flat.

"Oh, look at you," she cooed. "You're all squished. And so sweaty, mijo. You need a bath."

She set him in his ramekin and made coffee.

The legal pad was sitting by the fruit bowl where Izzy had left it, purple ink, skulls over the i's, a little checkmark next to every item they'd already done. Victoria picked it up with her mug in her other hand and read it while the coffee machine hissed. She read slowly, her lips moving now and then. Max watched her eyes travel down the page. One. Two. Three. Eleven, which had a checkmark Izzy had drawn with a lot of enthusiasm. Twelve, still circled, with a fresh tick. Then her eyes went back up the page and stopped.

She tapped the page with one red nail.

"Six," Victoria said.

Max's stomach turned over.

He knew number six. He'd read the whole list upside down off the counter a dozen times by now, the way you'd keep checking a mole you were worried about. 6. foot worship. Yellow. Izzy had drawn a little crown next to it.

"Mom—"

"You need a bath anyway, sweetie." Victoria set the pad down and smiled at him over her coffee. "And Mama needs a shower. So why not kill two birds?"

It took him a second to understand what was wrong with that. Then he got it, and it landed like a cold drip down his spine.

Izzy wasn't here.

Izzy was not in the kitchen. She was not on the stairs, not leaning in a doorway with her Monster and her innocent face, not reading off a color code or reminding anybody of anything. Izzy was somewhere across town in last night's clothes, and Victoria had picked up the list by herself, read it by herself, and chosen a number by herself.

Every other time, someone had nudged. Izzy, or the laptop, or Lupe. This time there was nobody to blame.

"Did Izzy tell you to—"

"Tell Mama what?" Victoria blinked at him, genuinely puzzled. "She's asleep, mijo." She took a sip of coffee and picked him up, ramekin and all. "Come on. Water's gonna take a minute to get hot."

*

The master bath had a walk-in shower with glass walls, a rain head the size of a hubcap, and a tiled bench along the back. Victoria set him on the bench in a shallow soap dish while she stripped.

She did it fast, without ceremony. The tank top went over her head. Her tits dropped free and swung, heavy and brown, nipples big and dark and puckered in the cool air of the bathroom. They settled on the top of her soft belly, and from the bench he was looking almost straight up at the undersides of them, two hanging hills with a deep fold of shadow where they met her ribs. Then she hooked her thumbs in the black briefs and peeled them down, and he watched them drag over the swell of her ass and drop to the tile. They were still dented in the shape of him.

She kicked them into the corner and turned on the water.

The sound was huge in there, a roar bouncing off the glass. Steam bloomed up and filled the stall in under a minute. Victoria stood under the rain head with her eyes closed and her face tipped up and let it pound down over her hair and her shoulders. The water sheeted off her tits in two streams and ran in rivers down the curve of her belly and her hips and the backs of her thighs. Drops the size of his fist splashed off the tile and soaked him from three feet away.

"Ahh," she sighed. "Okay, mijo. Mama's ready."

She turned the rain head down to a trickle and sat on the bench beside his soap dish, and the tile under him shivered when she landed. Then she lifted him out and set him on the wet floor of the stall, right in front of her feet.

They were already planted there, side by side, toes spread, water running off her ankles and pooling around her heels. The tile was hot from the spray. Steam hung over everything. From down here her shins went up into the fog, and her knees were two brown domes somewhere near the ceiling.

"Six says worship," Victoria said. She leaned over her own thighs to look down at him, her tits hanging over her knees and dripping on him. "Izzy wrote that word. Not Mama. But Mama looked it up, and it's not so different from what you already do. You just do it with your mouth too. And you mean it."

"I don't—"

"Shh. Start with the big one."

She lifted her right foot and held it in front of him, heel on the tile, so the whole underside of it rose over him in a wall. It was pink and wrinkled from the water at the toes, smooth at the arch, the heel ridged with dry skin the shower hadn't gotten to yet. Her big toe hung above his head. The nail was painted berry red, chipped at one corner.

He kissed it. There wasn't much else to do with it.

"Mm. Again. Mean it, mijo."

He kissed it again, and then the pad under it, and then he put his arms around the toe so his face was flat against the wet skin and kissed that too. The water had rinsed most of the taste off. What was left was salt, and last night's shea butter gone faint and soapy. She curled the toe against his chest and held him there.

"Now in between," she said.

The gaps between her toes were deep enough for his whole head. He had to wedge his shoulders in to reach the bottom of the first one. It was hotter in there than in the rest of the stall, a closed fold of skin the spray never reached, and the smell was stronger, sour and clean at once. He licked it because she told him to. He licked the next one too, and the next, working down the row toward her pinky, and each time he pulled his face out she wiggled the toes on either side of him and laughed under her breath.

"Look at you. You don't even need Izzy to tell you."

That stung more than it should have, because she was right. Nobody was in the doorway. Nobody was counting. The rain head dripped and the fan hummed and his stepmother sat on the bench with her elbows on her knees and watched him lick between her toes.

She switched feet. The left was the tight one, the arch she never stretched, and when he ran his tongue up the long curve of it she made a small sound and her toes clenched. He knew that arch. He'd rubbed it every morning for a week. Tasting it was different. He went heel to toe, the way she liked the rubs, and saved the toes for last, and when he got to them she put her heel down and leaned her weight forward and set her sole flat on top of him.

Not all of it. Just enough. The arch came down over his body and the ball of her foot covered his head, and the wet skin sealed over his mouth, and she held him under it against the tile.

"Kiss," she said from somewhere above.

He kissed the bottom of her foot from underneath. It was the only part of her he could reach.

"Good boy." She lifted the foot. Air and spray came back. "Now tell Mama they're pretty."

He lay on the tile coughing. "They're—"

"Pretty."

"They're pretty."

"Mama's feet are pretty," she corrected him, gently.

He shut his eyes. "Mama's feet are pretty."

"See?" She scooped him up off the tile and held him under the trickle to rinse him, then kissed him, wet and berry-red. "All clean. Both of us. And now you know six. Mama's going to want that one a lot, mijo."

"Every day?" Max croaked.

"See? You're learning."

*

She turned the water off. The roar stopped, and the bathroom went echoey and quiet except for dripping. She set Max on the bench to drain while she stepped out onto the bath mat and wrapped herself in a big white towel. It barely closed across her tits. She tucked the corner in between them, then picked him up and wrapped him in a hand towel, and the terry cloth was so thick and scratchy against his skin that it felt like being swaddled in carpet.

She carried him out into the bedroom like that, still dripping, humming, both of them pink from the steam.

The bedroom door opened.

"Morning," Izzy yawned.

She came in rubbing one eye with the heel of her hand, slouched and slow, the picture of a girl who'd just rolled out of bed. Her black fringe was crushed flat on one side. Her mouth hung half-open in a yawn. She shuffled over and dropped onto the edge of Victoria's bed and flopped back with her arms spread out, like even sitting up was too much.

"Oh, good morning, mija!" Victoria beamed. "Did you sleep okay? You were out."

"Mm. Like a corpse." Izzy stared at the ceiling. "Why's everybody wet?"

"Max had a bath."

"Cute." She didn't look at him.

Max looked at her.

She was wearing a black mesh top he'd never seen before, cropped short over a lacy bralette. A pair of ripped black jeans, low on her hips, with a silver chain looped from the belt to the back pocket. Eyeliner, smudged down past the corners of her eyes, but not the way it smudged from sleeping. The way it smudged after a long night somewhere loud. There was glitter on her cheek, one tiny speck. A stamp on the back of her hand, faded purple, half scrubbed off. And when she flopped back on the bed, the smell that came off her wasn't sleep at all. It was cigarette smoke, sweet vape, and a cologne that wasn't hers, heavy and woody, sticking to her clothes.

Nobody slept in jeans with a wallet chain.

Victoria was already turning toward the closet to pick out an outfit, chattering about errands, about the Target run, about whether Izzy wanted pancakes. She didn't look twice.

Izzy turned her head on the duvet.

Her eyes found Max in his hand towel, tucked in the crook of Victoria's arm, and held there. She saw him see the jeans. She saw him see the stamp, and the glitter, and the eyeliner. One eyebrow went up, very slightly.

Then she put one finger to her lips.

It was a small, lazy gesture, the way you'd shush a dog. It wasn't a plea. It was a reminder of who was in charge of whose secrets in this house.

"Pancakes sound amazing, Mom," Izzy said brightly, sitting up. "I'm gonna go shower, though. I feel, like, so gross."

She got up off the bed and headed out. She'd forgotten to take her shoes off. They were black platform boots, laced to the knee, and they clunked on the hardwood all the way down the hall.

Victoria, humming in the closet, never heard a thing.