Dead Weight Shrunken First Semester chapter 17 by maximally

Izzy was humming.

That was how Max knew it was going to be a bad day. She came down the stairs at nine-forty Wednesday morning in Miguel's white tank top, which hung to her thighs and had a sweat-yellowed collar, and she was humming something off one of her playlists, and she didn't stomp on the third stair the way she always did. She skipped it. Then she poured herself cereal, sat down at the island across from the ramekin where Victoria had parked him, and looked at him over the bowl while she chewed.

"Morning, lil bro," she said. "Sleep good?"

He hadn't. Miguel had left at five yesterday, ten minutes before the red Mercedes turned into the driveway, with his slides in one hand and a smirk that he'd aimed straight at the coffee table on the way out. And then, at one in the morning, the third stair had creaked again. Max had heard it from inside Victoria's briefs, where he'd been lying awake against the curve of her left cheek with his eyes open in the dark. He'd heard the bedroom door across the hall. He'd heard the rest of it too, for an hour, through two walls, faint and rhythmic and unmistakable, while his stepmother snored above him and her ass rose and fell on his chest with every breath.

He didn't say any of that. He said, "Fine."

"Cool." Izzy crunched. "Me too."

*

The phone rang at ten-fifteen.

Victoria was at the sink in her robe, rinsing a mug, with Max riding in the pocket over her left tit. The pocket was a recent development. It was terry cloth, just deep enough that he could stand in it with his arms folded on the rim, and on the other side of a thin layer of fabric her boob swung and settled against his back every time she moved. She dried her hands. She checked the screen. Her face did something complicated.

"It says Ventus University," she said.

"So don't answer," said Izzy.

Victoria answered.

"Hello, this is Victoria." Bright. Her phone voice. Max could hear the other end too, tinny and small, from four inches below her ear. A young woman. Cheerful in the way of someone reading from a screen.

"Hi! Is this the parent or guardian of Max Calhoun?"

Max went still in the pocket. So did Victoria's heart, for a beat. He felt it skip right through her tit and into his spine.

"Yes," said Victoria. "Yes, that's me. I'm his mother. Stepmother. Mother."

"Great! This is Brianna from Ventus University Residential Life, I'm just calling about move-in. We have Max down for August twenty-third, nine a.m. slot, Unaffiliated Students Dorm. I'm just doing some outreach because he hasn't completed his online check-in yet? It was due last Friday."

"Oh," said Victoria. "Oh, it was?"

"No worries at all! It happens. It's just that we do need it done to release his room key. And he also hasn't confirmed his meal plan, or his roommate contact. His roommate's actually reached out to us twice. A Zeke Torres? He's trying to coordinate, like, who's bringing the mini-fridge."

Max closed his eyes. He'd gotten that email in June. hey man looks like we're roomies, u game? i have a switch. He'd never answered it. He'd been meaning to.

"Of course," Victoria said. "Of course. The thing is, Brianna, Max is actually—he's not here right now. He's away."

"Oh! Okay. Is there a better number for him? I tried his cell, but it went straight to voicemail."

It would. His phone was upstairs in a drawer in Victoria's nightstand, where she'd put it on day two "so nobody bothers him." It had died on day five.

"He's in Mexico," said Victoria. "With his abuelo. They're building a school."

There was a pause on the line.

"Oh, wow," said Brianna. "That's amazing."

"It is amazing. It's very rural. There's no signal. There's barely any electricity. He calls when they go into town, but they don't go into town very often, because of the—" Victoria's free hand made a vague circle in the air, searching. "The goats."

Izzy put her spoon down very carefully so it wouldn't make a sound. Her shoulders had started to shake.

"Okay," said Brianna, more slowly. "Um. And he'll be back before the twenty-third?"

"Oh, yes. Absolutely. Definitely." Victoria's heart was going hard now. Max could feel it banging under his back, through the robe, fast and heavy. "Probably. Juan's very—they're very committed to the school."

"Okay. Well, if he can get to a computer at any point, the check-in only takes about ten minutes. And there's a deposit hold that goes on the account if it's not done by the first, which, honestly, is kind of a pain to undo."

"A deposit hold," Victoria repeated.

"It's just a hold! And honestly, if his plans have changed at all, if he's thinking about a gap semester or deferring or anything, that's totally fine, we just need to know so we can release the room. We have a waitlist."

Victoria's hand went flat against her chest, over the pocket. Over him. It was an automatic thing; she did it when she was nervous, the way other people reached for a necklace. Her palm covered the whole front of the pocket and he was in the dark, with her heartbeat drumming at his back and her voice humming down through her ribs.

"No," she said. "No, his plans haven't changed. He's very excited."

"Great! Love that. So I'll make a note, and I'll send a follow-up to the parent email on file, and if you could just pass along the message—"

"I'll pass it along."

"Awesome. Thanks so much, Mrs. Calhoun. Tell him Zeke says hi!"

Victoria hung up.

For a long moment, nobody said anything. Victoria stood at the sink with her hand still over the pocket and stared at the backsplash. Then she put the phone face down on the counter, very gently, like it might go off.

"Goats," said Izzy.

"Don't."

"Mom. Goats."

"I panicked, mija." Victoria pulled her hand away and looked down into the pocket. Her face was flushed under the makeup. There was a fine sheen of sweat at her hairline. "Did you hear her, sweetie? There's a hold. And a waitlist. And that boy, the Zeke boy, he's been calling them. About you." She pressed her lips together. "Why is he calling about you? He doesn't even know you."

"He's my roommate," said Max.

"He's a stranger."

"That's how roommates work, Mom."

"Mama," she corrected, automatically, and then she made a small, frustrated sound and turned around and put both hands flat on the counter and leaned on them, breathing. Her robe gaped. Max swung forward in the pocket and hung over the cleft between her tits, staring down into it while she sighed and sighed again. Her skin had gone blotchy across the top of her chest.

"Mama's fine," she said, to nobody. "Mama's fine."

*

It was Izzy who said it. Of course it was.

"You know what you should do?" She said it idly, scraping the last of the milk out of her bowl. "You should, like, sit on something."

Victoria looked at her.

"Like, for stress? There's this whole thing about it. Deep pressure. It's like a weighted blanket but in reverse." Izzy licked her spoon. "And number thirteen's still open."

Max knew number thirteen. He'd read the list upside down off the kitchen counter often enough by now. Thirteen: smothering. Face, boobs, butt. "Until i tap out."

"Izzy—" he started.

"I mean, he wrote it, Mom. It's literally what he wants." She put her bowl in the sink and squeezed past her mother on the way to the stairs, and paused just long enough to look at him in the pocket and smile, wide and white and satisfied. "Plus he's been, like, really tense lately."

Then she went back upstairs, humming.

*

Victoria put him on the couch.

Not on the middle cushion with a dish towel, and not in the dent. She set him down on his back on the left arm cushion, the hard one, which she never sat on because it had a spring in it, and she looked down at him for a long moment with her lip between her teeth. She'd taken the robe off. Underneath it she had on a gray sports bra and the black bike shorts she wore to her Pilates class and hadn't worn to Pilates in two weeks, because Pilates would have meant leaving him at home. The shorts were shiny and tight. They cut into her thighs at the hem. Her ass sat up high and round behind her, every curve of it painted on in black spandex, and when she turned around, the seam ran right down the middle of her crack and the two cheeks swelled out on either side of it, each one the size of a car hood from where he lay.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Mama's going to do it for real this time, mijo. Not gentle. You wanted not gentle." Her voice shook a little. "You tell Mama if it's too much."

He opened his mouth to tell her.

She sat.

There was no hovering this time. No inch-by-inch. She just let go of her knees and dropped, all six-foot-one of her, with a little grunt of effort at the bottom, and her ass came down on him in one drop. The spring under the cushion shrieked. The air went out of him all at once. The whole world went black and hot and solid, spandex on his face, ass on his chest, and the couch cushion under his back sank and sank and finally stopped, and then her weight settled the last half-inch and kept on settling.

Then she leaned back.

"Ohhh," said Victoria, from a long way up. "Oh, that's good."

She wiggled. Not a little shift. A full, grinding roll of her hips, side to side, working herself down into the cushion and working him down with her. Her left cheek rolled across his face and his right arm. Her right cheek rolled across his legs. The crack passed right over him, the seam of the shorts dragging up his chest and over his nose, and then the cheeks closed in on both sides and held him in the middle, wrapped in hot black spandex from his shoulders to his knees.

It smelled of laundry detergent and the inside of a gym bag and, underneath that, Victoria: her sweat, her skin, the musk she'd been building in those shorts since she pulled them on.

"Goats," Victoria said bitterly, above him. "Goats, Victoria."

She bounced.

It was a small bounce. To her it was probably nothing. To him it was an earthquake: she lifted half an inch, and air came rushing in around his face, and then she dropped again, and the cushion slammed up into his back and her ass slammed down into his front and he was a slice of ham in a press. She did it again. And again. Little irritated bounces, the kind you do on a bed when you've had a bad phone call, and every one of them crushed him flat.

"A hold," she muttered. Bounce. "A waitlist." Bounce. "Like we're on a list for a restaurant." Bounce. "Who is Zeke?"

She stopped bouncing and settled. Her whole weight bore down. Two hundred and fifty pounds, more or less, all of it on a three-inch boy on a broken spring, and she dug in her heels and pushed back into the cushion and ground.

Max couldn't breathe. It wasn't fear. There wasn't room for fear. He couldn't move his arms. He could barely move his eyelids. All he had was heat, and pressure, and the thud of her pulse coming down through her ass, and her voice going on and on above him, getting quieter as she talked herself down.

"It's fine. Mama's fine. We'll do the check-in. We'll just do the check-in. And then we'll—I'll call and say he's deferring. Or we won't. We'll figure it out." She sighed, and he felt her whole body sag, and that was worse, that was more weight, the last of the tension draining out of her and all of it pouring down into him. "Mama just needs a minute, sweetie. Mama just needs a minute with her boy."

She stayed there a lot longer than a minute.

Somewhere in there, a fart came out of her. She didn't seem to notice. It was the kind you don't notice on a couch at the end of a bad morning, low and long and muffled in spandex, and it rolled straight out into the dark where his face was.

brrrrrrp

It was hot, and it hung there, trapped between her cheeks with nowhere to go. It smelled of coffee and the egg-white omelet she'd had at eight. He breathed it in because there was nothing else to breathe.

And something in him went very quiet.

He couldn't have said when it happened. Sometime after the third bounce, maybe, or when she started grinding, or when she sighed. All he knew was that his whole body had stopped fighting the weight and started leaning up into it. The pressure on his chest wasn't something he was waiting out anymore. It was holding him. Every breath she took rocked down through her hips and into his ribs. Every time she shifted, he shifted with her. Up there, a whole world of trouble was going on: a hold, a waitlist, a roommate, a check-in form, Brianna from Residential Life with her pleasant little voice. Down here none of it could get to him. There wasn't room. There was only Victoria, all of her, on top of him, and that was the whole list.

Then she said, "Okay," and her weight began to come off.

It went in stages. First her heels came off the floor. Then her hips tipped forward. Then the ass lifted away from his face, and cool air rushed into the space where it had been, and light, ordinary living-room light, and the sound of the fridge humming, and the ceiling fan. The spandex peeled up off his skin with a little tug. The cushion started to rise back up under him.

She was almost all the way up when he heard himself say it.

"Wait."

Victoria froze, halfway to standing, her ass a foot above his face.

"Mama," Max said. His voice was hoarse. He was flat on his back on the cushion with his arms out, in the dent she'd left, and it was too bright and too cold, and the words just came. "Wait. Don't—you don't have to get up yet."

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder. Her face was still blotchy from the call. Her eyes were wet. They went wide.

"Mijo," she said softly. "Are you sure?"

He wasn't sure about anything. He had never been less sure of anything in his life. He had a roommate named Zeke who wanted to know who was bringing a mini-fridge. He had a room key waiting six hours down the road and a deposit hold coming on the first and a check-in form that only took ten minutes. He had a whole life that was still technically his, waiting for him to come and get it.

And he was lying on his back on a couch with his arms out, asking his stepmother to sit on him again.

"Yeah," Max said. "Yeah. I'm sure."

Victoria let out a sound he'd never heard from her before, a wet, shaky laugh that was half a sob. Then she lowered herself back down. Not dropping, this time. She did it with care, watching him over her shoulder until the last moment, until her ass blotted out the light. The heat closed over him again, and the dark, and the smell. Her weight came down and found him and settled.

The rest of the morning went out of him on his next breath: Brianna, the hold, the form, Zeke and his mini-fridge, all of it pressed out flat.

"There," Victoria whispered. "There's Mama's boy."