Grown Women Shrunken First Semester chapter 15 by maximally

He woke up because the ceiling was moving.

It wasn't the ceiling. It was Lupe, breathing. Sometime in the night her tits had rolled him down into the hollow above her belly, and every slow inhale lifted him an inch and every exhale set him back down, damp and warm, in the pink dark of the housecoat. A seam of gray light showed between two of the snaps. Outside, a lawnmower started up three houses away.

Then her hand came down flat over him, big as a quilt, and stayed there.

"Shh," Lupe said, still mostly asleep. "Too early, mijo."

It was seven-forty. He knew because the alarm on Victoria's phone went off through the wall at seven-forty, and because ten seconds after that Victoria's door opened, and ten seconds after that she was standing in the guest room doorway in her robe with her hair in a claw clip, saying, "Is he up? Did he sleep? Mamá, did he sleep?"

"He slept," said Lupe, without opening her eyes. "He snores."

"He does not snore."

"Like a little kitten. Go make coffee."

*

They had coffee at the island, and Max had a drop of it in a bottle cap, and it hit him like a full espresso.

Lupe still hadn't let him out. She'd undone one snap so his head could poke out of the housecoat for air, and that was all. Victoria kept glancing at the gap from across the island, the way you'd glance at someone else's dessert.

"So," said Lupe, and set down her mug.

Victoria set down hers.

"Eight," said Lupe.

"Eight," said Victoria.

Max, sticking out of his grandmother's housecoat like a kangaroo joey, said nothing. He had learned that much in sixteen days.

"I was thinking last night," Lupe said, "while you were slamming doors."

"I didn't slam—"

"I was thinking, we're grown women. We're family. Family doesn't fight over a boy like two girls at a quinceañera." She spread her hands on the counter. "So. We share."

Victoria narrowed her eyes. "Share how?"

"You take a turn. I take a turn. Then"—Lupe shrugged, big and easy—"we both take a turn. Everybody's happy."

"Who goes first?"

"You do. He's your son." Lupe smiled sweetly. "And Abuela goes second, so I can fix whatever you did wrong."

Victoria opened her mouth, then shut it again, because it was the best deal she was going to get and they both knew it.

From the hall came the sound of bare feet stopping on the stairs, and then going back up. Izzy, Max guessed, had heard enough to know how this was going to go, and had decided for once she didn't need to be in the room for it.

*

They used Victoria's bed, because it was the biggest one, and because Victoria said so.

She laid a bath towel down across the duvet first. Max noticed the towel. He noticed it was folded in half, which meant she'd thought about it, which meant she'd been thinking about this before the coffee, maybe before she'd even gone to sleep.

Then she stood at the foot of the bed with her back to him and let the robe drop.

There was nothing under it. He'd been in her underwear for most of a week, but that was in the dark, from the inside. He had never seen her like this, in daylight, all of it at once. Victoria's ass was tall and round and the color of caramel, a little paler where her bikini usually went, with two dimples right above it where her back curved in. When she climbed onto the bed on her knees and lay face down on the towel, it rose up off the mattress in two full, smooth hills, and the crack between them ran down deep into shade.

Lupe set Max down on the small of Victoria's back.

Up close, her skin was a whole landscape: fine invisible hairs, a freckle the size of his palm, the faint crisscross pattern of the sheets still pressed into one cheek. It was warm under his feet. It smelled of last night's lotion and sleep, and lower down, where the cheeks met, of something muskier.

"Go on, sweetie," said Victoria into the pillow. Her voice was muffled and shy. "Mama's ready."

He walked down to the edge of her right cheek. It sloped away from him like the side of a dune. He knelt.

He'd been doing what they told him for sixteen days, and his body knew the drill before his head did. He leaned forward and kissed it.

Under his lips, the whole cheek twitched.

"Oh," said Victoria.

"Again," said Lupe. She'd pulled Victoria's vanity chair over and sat in it backward, arms folded on the back, watching like a coach at a swim meet. "Slower. Use your whole face, mijo. She's not a stamp."

He kissed it again, slower, and then again, and moved along the curve. The skin was smooth and a little salty and so soft it gave under his mouth. He pressed his cheek flat against hers and felt her heat soak into him. He nuzzled. He didn't decide to nuzzle; it just happened, the way you rub your face into a pillow, and when it did, Victoria made a sound he'd never heard her make, a little high hum, and her ass clenched once, slowly, and relaxed.

"He's good at it, Mamá," she breathed. "He's really good at it."

"He's okay," said Lupe. "Now the middle."

The middle. Max looked down into the crack. It was steep and dark, the cheeks curving in on both sides until they met, and the air coming up out of it was hot and close and smelled powerfully of Victoria.

"Mamá, maybe not the—"

"It's on the list, mija. It says it right there. 'Including crack.' Izzy underlined it."

Of course she had.

He climbed down between the cheeks. It was like stepping down into a warm, narrow ravine, and the walls closed in on both sides of him as soon as he was in, soft and heavy and faintly damp. He put his hands out flat on either side. He kissed the left wall, then the right. Then, because there was nothing else to do, he stuck out his tongue and licked a long stripe up the inside of her right cheek, from the bottom of the crack to the top.

Salt. Sweat. Skin. Her.

Victoria's whole body went still. Then she squeezed, and both walls closed on him at once, and for a moment he was held completely, from his shoulders to his knees, in the clench of his stepmother's ass.

"Sorry!" she gasped, and let go. "Sorry, sweetie. Mama didn't mean to. It just—it tickles."

"It doesn't tickle," said Lupe dryly. "You liked it."

"Mamá!"

"Grown women, Victoria."

*

Lupe's turn came after twenty minutes, which Victoria said wasn't nearly long enough, and Lupe said was ten minutes more than she'd agreed to.

Lupe undressed the way she did everything, fast and without any fuss. The housecoat went over the chair. The nightgown went over her head. And then there was Abuela, all of her, in the morning light: broad brown shoulders, thick strong arms, the long gray-black braid hanging down her back, and below it the widest ass he'd ever seen. She lay down on the towel, face down, with a grunt of satisfaction, and it spread out across the bed like rising dough.

It was a different country from Victoria's. Lower, wider, heavier, a real shelf, with silver stretch marks running across the tops of both cheeks like rivers on a map. There was solid muscle underneath; when she shifted, he could see it working under the softness. Her crack was deeper and longer than her daughter's, and when Victoria set him down at the top of it, he couldn't see the bottom.

"Okay, mijo," said Lupe comfortably. "Show Abuela what you learned."

He showed her.

He started on her left cheek the way he'd started on Victoria's, kissing his way along the stretch marks, one after another. They were smooth and slightly cooler than the skin around them, and Lupe made an approving noise every time he got to a new one, like she was checking boxes. He laid his whole body down on the curve of her and nuzzled, and the flesh shifted under him in a slow heavy roll, and he rode it.

"Mm," said Lupe. "Better than your abuelo."

"Mamá!"

"What? It's true."

Victoria had taken the vanity chair now. She was sitting in it with her knees pulled up inside her robe and her chin on them, watching, and every so often she said, "He did that to me first," or, "He's doing it softer for you," in a small hurt voice.

"Because I tell him what I want," said Lupe. "You just lie there going 'oh, oh.' Mijo, the middle."

Lupe's crack was a canyon. He slid down into it, and the cheeks didn't just close around him the way Victoria's had, they swallowed him, a deep hot pressure on both sides, and the smell was thicker down there, earthier, rosewater gone to musk. He kissed. He licked. He worked his way down, a long way down, his tongue tracing one wall and then the other, while Lupe hummed contentedly into the pillow.

Then she shifted her hips. A small, low, rumbling sound came out of the dark beneath him.

pfft

Warm air rolled over him, gentle and heavy. Max froze.

"Mamá," Victoria groaned.

"Ay, it was a little one." Lupe didn't sound sorry at all. "It's the pozole. He's fine. Keep going, mijo."

He kept going.

*

Then both of them at once.

It was Lupe's idea, naturally. They lay down side by side on the towel, face down, hip to hip, the way they'd sat on the couch the day before. Only this time there were no leggings and no yoga pants, just two bare asses lying next to each other, caramel and brown, tall and wide, rising up off the bed like a little mountain range. Victoria's right cheek and Lupe's left lay pressed together in the middle, and where they touched, they made a third crack, a new one, half daughter and half mother.

They put him right in the middle of that one.

"Now," said Lupe, "he can do us both."

"He has to do us equally," said Victoria.

"Mija, nobody is counting."

"I'm counting."

So he did them both. He kissed left, toward Lupe, and then right, toward Victoria, and then left again. He buried his face in the place where they met and nuzzled, and both of them sighed at the same time, and then both of them laughed at themselves for sighing. He licked up the seam between the two cheeks, and it tasted of two different women: Victoria's salt and cocoa butter on one side, Lupe's rosewater and muskier sweat on the other.

They talked the whole time. They talked over him, and about him, and through him.

"He goes left more."

"He goes left because I'm bigger, Victoria. More to work with."

"He kissed me nine times that round."

"Nobody is counting."

"Mijo, sweetie, do Mama's dimples. No, the dimples, up top—oh. Oh, that's nice. Mamá, did he do that for you?"

"He did my stretch marks. You don't have stretch marks."

"I had two kids—"

"One kid. The other one is your stepson, and he's down there with his face in your culo, so let's not get technical."

Victoria made a scandalized sound and squeezed, and Lupe squeezed back to show her she could, and for a long moment Max was pinned between them in a hot, double clench, his face in Victoria's cheek and his back in Lupe's. Their skin was slick now where they met, a thin sheen of sweat from two big women lying hip to hip in a warm bedroom with the sun coming through the blinds. They breathed together. He breathed with them, what little he could.

Then they let go. Both at once, as if they'd planned it.

*

Afterward Lupe went to shower and pack, because the drive was six hours and she wanted to beat the traffic on the Grapevine. Victoria stayed lying on her stomach on the towel with her chin on her folded arms, and Max sat on the small of her back, in the dip above her dimples, and neither of them said anything for a while.

The house was quiet. Water ran in the guest bathroom. A car door shut down the street. Victoria's back rose and fell under him, slow, and the skin there was warm and still faintly damp, and he could taste her and Lupe both when he licked his lips.

He took stock, the way he'd been doing every morning since he woke up small.

His jaw ached. His knees were pink from kneeling on skin. His whole body smelled like the two of them, and he suspected it would for the rest of the day. He had kissed and licked his stepmother's ass and his grandmother's ass for most of an hour, on purpose, while they argued about whose turn it was.

He waited for the shame to show up. It always did. It had shown up the first night in the drawer, and in the briefs, and under the foot, and on the couch, right on schedule.

It didn't come.

What came instead was a slow, heavy, all-over looseness, the kind you get after a long swim. And underneath it, quieter, something he really didn't want to look at: for a whole hour, nobody had talked about college. Nobody had talked about what he was going to be, or where he was going, or whether he'd make friends. Two women had just wanted him, as much of him as they could get, so badly they'd fought about it.

He hadn't hated it.

He sat with that. It didn't go away.