Tasting Notes Shrunken First Semester chapter 22 by maximally

Artemis took him out of her pocket before she left.

She did it standing at the island, with her back to Izzy, both hands cupped, her face red to the ears and her mouth shut tight around whatever she wasn't saying. She set him down on the dish towel. Her fingers stayed around him a second longer than they needed to.

"Sorry," she said. "Sorry. I'm not—I can't be in here right now. I'll call you. I'll text. Answer me, okay? Answer me." Then, to Victoria, without looking at her: "Bye, Tía."

The front door didn't slam. That was worse. It closed with a click, and then the Subaru started up in the driveway, and he heard it back out too fast and catch the curb with one wheel, and then it was gone down the street, and the stickered rear window went with it.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Victoria stood at the sink and looked out the window at the empty driveway. She'd taken her sunglasses off at some point. Without them she looked tired in a way he'd never seen, the skin under her eyes gone bruise-colored, the claw clip slipping.

"Mama's going to lie down," she said finally. She didn't pick him up. She looked at him on the towel for a second, and then at Izzy, and then she poured a glass of white wine, very full, and took it upstairs with her.

Izzy waited until the bedroom door closed. Then she hopped off the counter, padded over to the island in her bare feet, and leaned on her elbows in front of him, so her face hung over the whole towel, the dark eyeliner, the stud in her nose, Miguel's tank top drooping open at the neck.

"So," she said. "I won."

He didn't say anything.

"She always does that. Shows up, cries about something, leaves. She'll be back at Thanksgiving with a new piercing and a girlfriend named, like, Sage." Izzy picked at a chip in her black nail polish. For a second her face wasn't doing anything at all. "She used to braid my hair. On the floor at Abuela's. In LA. When I was, like, nine."

Then she blinked, and it was gone, and she grinned at him.

"Whatever. Ew. Don't look at me like that, it's creepy." She scooped him up off the towel. "You're with me tonight. Mom's not gonna fight about it. Mom's gonna drink that whole bottle and watch Love Island and cry." She held him up to her face. "And Mom's been skipping the good ones."

*

Her room smelled the way it always smelled: incense, Monster, unwashed laundry, the dark sweet fog of a bedroom with the window never opened. Black sheets. Fairy lights. A mannequin head wearing a choker. She set him on her nightstand next to a half-full can and a bong she'd hidden badly behind a stack of manga, and sat cross-legged on the bed, and pulled the legal pad out from under her pillow.

"Six," she read. "Eight. Eleven. Twelve." She looked at him. "Mom does these like she's in church." She tossed the pad aside. "Mom's having a moment. So you get the house special. Same menu. My kitchen."

"Iz—"

"Shh. I'm being a host." She climbed off the bed, dug around in the pile of clothes on the closet floor, and came back with a pair of black high-top Converse and a wad of black socks gone gray and shiny at the heels. "Okay. So these are from, like, Thursday through Saturday. Three days. Boots on Thursday, Chucks the rest." She sniffed one sock, made a face, and looked delighted. "Oh. Okay. That's a vintage."

She put them on. She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled on the socks, laced the Converse halfway, and stomped around the room for ten minutes doing nothing, scrolling her phone, kicking at the laundry, "letting it breathe." Then she sat down again, toed the Converse off, and propped her right foot up on the nightstand next to him.

The sock was right there. A gray-black wall of threadbare cotton, ribbed, stiff at the heel, worn so thin across the ball that he could see the pink of her skin through it. The smell came off it in a wave. It was sharp and sour and vinegary, rotten-cheese and wet dog and old rubber, and under all of that something salty and alive that was just her. His eyes watered.

"First course," Izzy said, in a terrible French accent. "Ze feet. Go on. Lick it."

He licked the sock.

It was damp. It was gritty. It tasted of salt and vinegar and the inside of a shoe, and the cotton came away on his tongue in little fuzzy threads. He gagged.

"Describe," Izzy said.

"It's—sour."

"Sour how. Be specific. You're a professional."

"Like vinegar," he said. "And cheese. And—sweat. Old sweat. And something like pennies."

"Oh my God, pennies." She was cackling. "Okay. Hang on." She peeled the sock off. Underneath, her foot was flushed pink and damp, the sole wrinkled from the cotton, a ridge of gray lint packed in between each toe. She spread her toes in front of his face. The smell doubled. "Get in there. The toe jam's the good part. That's, like, the terroir."

He did it. He put his face between her big toe and the next one and licked the lint out, and it was salty and thick and bitter, and the sides of her toes were slick and hot against his cheeks. She wiggled them. They clamped on his head. She giggled and let go.

"Score?"

"I don't—"

"Out of ten, Max."

He was hard. He'd been hard since the sock. He couldn't do anything about it, so he didn't try to hide it. "Seven," he said.

Izzy's eyebrows went up. "Seven? Rude. That's a nine and you know it." But she was grinning. She took her foot down. "Okay. Palate cleanser."

She drank from the can of Monster, swished it, swallowed, and burped. Then she peeled Miguel's tank top off over her head.

*

Her tits came out heavy and pale under the fairy lights, round, the nipples small and dark brown and puffy. She didn't care about any of that. She raised her left arm and put her hand behind her head and leaned over the nightstand so her armpit hung over him.

"Second course," she said. "Four and five. Two for one. Mom skipped right past the boring ones, so, like, you jumped the whole line. Congrats. This is your first time. I haven't showered since, like, Saturday. And that's Miguel's shirt, so, like. Notes of Miguel."

It was a hollow of damp, pale skin, stubbly, with three days of dark regrowth prickling out of it, and a little gray roll of dried deodorant in the crease that hadn't washed off since whenever she'd last put any on. It smelled stronger than her feet. Sharper. Onions and hot metal and the deep musky funk of a body that had been sweating through a tank top all afternoon while two girls screamed at each other in its kitchen. Underneath that, faintly, something that wasn't hers at all, a guy's cheap body spray.

She lowered it onto him.

Her armpit closed over his whole upper body. The stubble rasped his cheeks. It was wet in the center and tacky at the edges, and the heat was unbelievable, a damp oven, and she clamped her arm down so he was locked in with his face buried in the hottest part of it.

"Lick," Izzy said, muffled, from above.

He licked. Salt. Bitter. The chalky crumble of the deodorant, which tasted of soap and nothing. The stubble scraped his tongue. He licked again, deeper, into the crease, and the musk came up so strong he nearly blacked out, and his dick throbbed against her ribs where she'd pinned him.

She let him go. He sucked in air.

"Describe."

"Onions," he croaked. "Metal. And—Miguel's Axe."

"Oh my God." She fell back on the bed laughing, holding her stomach, her tits shaking. "That's so gross. You're so gross. Score?"

He thought about it, which was its own kind of horrible.

"Eight," he said.

She stopped laughing. She sat up and looked at him over her knees, and there was something in her face that wasn't quite a smirk.

"Huh," she said. "You're getting into it."

*

The main course was on the bed.

She pulled her bike shorts down and kicked them off and knelt on the black sheets with her back to him, and then she put her chest down on the mattress and her ass up in the air, the way she'd stretch in the mornings. She reached back with both hands and pulled her cheeks apart.

He was on the sheet between her knees, looking up. Her ass filled the whole room. Pale, round, heavy, a wide spread of dimpled cheeks with red pressure marks across them from sitting on the counter all afternoon, a bruise on one side that might have been from Miguel's hand. Her crack opened under her fingers into a deep dark valley, hairy, the black hair curling damp down the middle of it, and at the bottom of the valley her asshole: a tight dark pucker, ridged, wrinkled, flushed brownish-pink, twitching in the open air.

The smell rolled down out of it, hot and dense. Stronger than the pits. Stronger than anything. Sweat and musk and the deep, earthy, shameful smell of an ass that had not been washed in three days and had farted its way through all of them.

"Main course," Izzy said into the pillow. "Chef's specialty. Go on, butt boy. Eat."

He climbed up into her crack.

The hair caught at his arms. The skin of her cheeks was damp and hot and closed in a little on either side of him as he went. When he got to the bottom, the pucker was right there, at chest height, bigger around than his head. He put his face against it. It was hot and wrinkled and wet with sweat, and it twitched against his cheek.

He licked it.

It was bitter. It was salty. It tasted of musk and skin and something underneath that he didn't want to name and named anyway. Izzy let out a breath. He licked again, around the rim, following the ridges with his tongue, and it clenched and loosened under him and her whole ass rocked back an inch.

"Mm," she said. "Okay. Okay, that's—keep going."

He kept going. He licked her asshole in long strokes, and in little circles, and pushed his tongue into the center of it and felt it give. He got his arms around it as far as they'd reach and held on. The taste went all through his mouth and down his throat and up into his head, and the shame came with it, and the want came with it, and they didn't fight anymore. They just sat next to each other in him, filling the same space.

Izzy started breathing harder. Her hips rocked back against his face, little pushes, and he licked harder to meet them.

"Describe," she said, a little ragged.

He pulled back enough to speak. His face was wet. "Bitter," he said. "And salty. And dark."

"Dark." She laughed into the pillow, breathless. "That's not a flavor, nerd."

"It is in there."

"Score."

He looked at the pucker in front of him, wet with his spit, still twitching, and he knew what he was going to say before he said it, and he hated himself, and he said it anyway.

"Ten."

Izzy went quiet.

Then she let go of her cheeks, and they closed in around him, and she said, very calmly, "Okay. Then you're sleeping in it."

She didn't take him out. She reached back with one hand and pushed him down the last inch, so his face was flat against her hole and his legs hung down the seam toward the sheet, and she squeezed once, hard, testing.

"Can you breathe?"

"Barely."

"You can breathe under Mom's ass for two hours." She rolled onto her side, top knee drawn up, and her cheeks settled over him from both sides, hot and damp and hairy, and sealed. The world went black. The air in there was thick and hot and smelled of exactly what it was. But it was air. There was a thin seam of it running up the crack where her cheeks didn't quite meet, and if he tipped his head back, he could get his mouth into it, and sip.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. That's good. That's actually so good."

She pulled the black sheet up over herself and turned off the fairy lights with her phone.

"Night, butt boy," she said. Then, after a second, much quieter: "Don't leave."

*

He thought he'd be awake all night.

For a while he was. He lay locked in her crack, in the hot dark, feeling everything. Her heartbeat thudded through her cheeks on both sides of him, steady and strong. Her breathing went long and even. When she fell asleep, her whole ass relaxed, and he sank in another quarter-inch, and her cheeks settled over his ears.

Around one, her stomach gurgled. He felt it start somewhere far above him and roll down, a long rumble through her on every side of him, and then her hole loosened against his face, and the gas came straight out over him.

pfffffft

It was hot and wet and sulfurous, and it stayed in the crack with him because there was nowhere for it to go. He coughed. She didn't wake up. She smacked her lips in her sleep and rolled half onto her stomach, and her full weight came down, and her cheeks clamped shut.

Around three, another one.

BRRRRAAP

This one shook him. It came out of her with a force that buzzed through his whole body, and pushed his head back against her cheek, and hung around him in a thick hot cloud. She sighed in her sleep, contented, and wiggled her hips, and went still again.

He breathed it. There wasn't anything else to breathe.

Somewhere after that, he stopped counting. Stopped flinching. He lay there with her heartbeat around him and her heat around him and her breathing going up and down, and the dark wasn't dark anymore, it was just Izzy, and he was just in it.

He thought about Artemis's Subaru catching the curb. Answer me, okay?

He thought about the beer. Just take it, God, you're so dramatic.

He didn't think about anything after that.

*

When he woke up, there was gray light coming through the seam of her crack, faint, a pale line at the top of the dark.

It took him a second to remember where he was. Then he remembered, and it should have been horrible, and he lay there waiting for it to be horrible.

Her heartbeat was still going around him, heavier now, a sleep rhythm. Her cheeks were still clamped around him. His legs had gone numb hours ago, and he couldn't feel his arms, and his face was crusted with her sweat and his own spit and probably worse.

He felt fine.

He felt rested. That was what he couldn't get past. His body felt loose and heavy and easy all over, the way it used to feel on Saturday mornings in eighth grade, before alarms, before anything. After the second fart, nothing. He hadn't woken up when she rolled. He hadn't woken up at all.

He tried to remember the last time he'd slept straight through.

Not in the jewelry tray. Not in the briefs, not in Lupe's housecoat, not in Abuela's bed under the gold cross. Not in his own bed, the last night he'd had a bed, with a beer in him and the boxes half packed.

He lay there in the gray light, in his stepsister's crack, and counted back, and couldn't find it.