Hot Water Shrunken First Semester chapter 23 by maximally

Izzy got him out in the bathroom, standing over the sink, with one foot up on the toilet lid and her phone propped against the mirror so she could watch a TikTok while she did it.

It took about four seconds. She reached back, pinched him by the shoulders, and pulled, and he came unstuck from between her cheeks all at once with a wet peel that went through his whole body, and then he was dangling in the cold bathroom air, damp, steaming faintly, his legs pins and needles from the hips down.

"Ew," Izzy said happily. She held him under the faucet and turned it on. "Morning, roomie."

He couldn't say anything. He just stood in the basin and let the water run over him and waited for his legs to come back.

*

Victoria was at the kitchen island at nine-thirty, in her satin robe, with her sunglasses on indoors and two Advil and a coffee in front of her. She hadn't done her lipstick. The wine bottle from last night was in the recycling by the back door, empty, and she'd put it there neatly, label facing out, which was somehow worse than if she'd left it on the counter.

Izzy put him down on his dish towel and poured herself a bowl of Froot Loops and ate them standing up.

"Morning, Mom."

"Morning, mija." Victoria's voice was very quiet. She didn't look at Max. Then she did, quickly, and looked away again. "Did he sleep okay? Mama didn't—Mama didn't check on him."

"He slept fine," Izzy said, with her mouth full. "He sleeps better in there."

She said it the way she'd say it's gonna be hot today. She didn't even look up from her bowl.

Victoria put her coffee down.

"In there," she said.

"Yeah. In there. Like, in my butt. All night." Izzy shrugged. "He didn't even move. I had, like, three burritos' worth of gas going on and he slept through it." She crunched. "I think it's the heartbeat. Like how babies sleep on you. You told me that. When I was little, you told me I'd only sleep on your chest."

Victoria looked at Max on the towel.

He didn't say anything. He couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't a lie. His face was hot. Under the shame, quiet, there was something else, and it was the memory of the gray light through the seam and how loose his body had felt, and he hated that it was there, and it stayed.

"Is that true, sweetie?" Victoria asked.

He nodded.

She took her sunglasses off. Her eyes were red-rimmed, puffy, the eyeliner from yesterday still smudged faintly in the creases. She looked at him for a long time. He watched it work on her. He watched her turn it over. Not the part where Izzy had slept on him in her crack. The part where he slept, and he was calm, and there was a heartbeat, and a baby asleep on its mother's chest. Something she could hold.

"Okay," Victoria said finally. "Okay. Thank you, mija. For looking after him."

"Sure." Izzy rinsed her bowl and left it in the sink. "I'm going to Miguel's. Bye, butt boy."

She went upstairs to get dressed. He heard her door, and then her music.

Victoria sat with her coffee and her sunglasses in her hand and didn't drink the coffee.

The legal pad wasn't by the fruit bowl. Izzy had taken it upstairs last night, and it hadn't come back down.

He didn't need it. He'd read the whole list a hundred times by now, upside down off the kitchen counter. He knew which lines had checkmarks. Six had one, from the morning after the black briefs: 6. foot worship. Izzy had drawn a little crown next to it.

He remembered all of it. The hot tile. The gaps between her toes. Her sole sealed over his mouth, and Mama's feet are pretty, and her laughing under her breath. It had been a lesson to her. It had been a test to him.

That wasn't what he wanted.

He didn't have a word for what he wanted. He'd been trying to find one since Saturday, on the coffee table, in the cup holder, in Lupe's bed, in Izzy's crack all night, and the closest he'd got was her bathroom, and the shower, and her, and that was already checked off.

"Mom," he said.

"Mm?"

"Can I ask you something?"

She looked at him then. "Of course you can, sweetie."

He opened his mouth. His face went hot, and then his neck, and then all the way down to his feet. She waited.

"It's just," Max said. "Last night. Izzy."

She didn't say anything.

"She was kind of—a lot." He couldn't look at her. He looked at the satin robe instead. "She made me, like, rate stuff. Her socks. Her pits. Her—everything. And then she made me sleep in it. And it was fine. I mean, it was fine. I did sleep. But I've just been—I don't know. Since Saturday I've been—"

He stopped.

"You missed Mama," Victoria said quietly.

"Yeah."

"That's all right, mijo."

"It's not—that's not it. It's." He shut his eyes. His heart was going so fast it hurt. "Are you gonna take a shower? Like, now?"

Victoria tilted her head.

"Because I was thinking," he said, too fast, "if you were. I know it's on the list. I know six is already checked off. I'm not asking for the feet thing, I don't want to do anything, I just—" He ran out of air. He made himself say it. "Can I come in with you? Just. With you."

For a second, she didn't move.

Then she smiled. It wasn't her bright party smile, or her phone voice, or the delighted squeal she did when she'd won something. It was small and calm and a little sad around the edges. It was the smile of a woman who had known for a while what he was going to ask her, one way or another, and had been waiting for him to get there on his own.

"Mama was going to shower anyway," Victoria said. "Mama could use one." She stood up with him in both hands. "Come on, mijo."

*

She didn't use the soap dish.

She set him on the edge of the vanity while she ran the water, and he sat on the cold marble with his knees pulled up and watched her undress. She untied the satin robe and let it fall open and then off her shoulders, and it slid to the tile in a pale heap. There was nothing under it.

She stood there for a moment in the steam with her back to him, looking at herself in the fogging mirror. He could see all of her. Her long brown back, her hair loose and tangled over one shoulder. The two dimples at the base of her spine. Her ass, high and round and heavy, the cheeks flushed faintly pink, a crease from the sheets still printed across the left one. Her thighs, thick and smooth, touching all the way down. When she turned, her tits swung free and settled on her belly, full and brown and heavy, the nipples dark and wide. Her stomach curved out under them, round, with a deep navel and a faint line of stretch marks low on one side. Below that, between her thighs, a neat dark triangle of curls.

She caught him looking. She didn't cover anything.

"Give Mama a minute first, okay?" she said. "Mama needs to wash off last night."

She stepped in under the rain head and closed the glass door behind her.

He watched through the steam. She stood with her eyes shut and her face tipped up and let the water hammer down over her, and for a long time she didn't do anything else. Then she took the bottle of body wash, not the coconut, a plain one, and lathered her hands and washed herself all over. She did her neck first, where Bea's mark had faded to a yellow smudge, scrubbing at it with her fingertips. Her arms. Her tits, lifting each one and washing under it. Her belly. Between her legs, quickly, with her back half turned. Her thighs. She washed her face with both hands until the last smudge of yesterday's eyeliner ran off her cheek in a gray thread and went down the drain, and the wine went with it, and then she just stood there, rinsing, with her hands flat on the tile and her head bowed under the spray.

When she opened the door again, she smelled of nothing but soap and herself.

"Okay," she said. "Now you."

*

She started out the way he'd asked.

She picked him up in her whole hand, cupped, and laid him on the top of her left tit under the water, with her palm across his back so the spray broke on her knuckles instead of on him. She hummed something, Selena maybe. She worked a drop of shampoo into his hair with one fingertip, down the back of his neck where Izzy's nails had left it tender, and for a minute it was exactly what he'd wanted.

"There's my boy," she murmured.

Then she reached past him for the body wash.

She rolled him through a glob of it until he was slick from head to foot. Then she held him around the middle with her thumb and two fingers and started on her collarbone.

"Mom," he said.

She didn't hear him. She dragged him across the top of her tits, left to right, right to left, in long lathering strokes, and he understood with a little drop in his stomach that she wasn't doing it to him. She wasn't doing it to anybody. Her eyes were half shut, her mouth a little open. She was somewhere else.

The humming had stopped.

She took him down the slope of her left tit and across the nipple. It was hard, harder than the cold air in the bathroom could explain, a pebbled knob bigger than his head that scraped up his chest and his stomach and his thighs as she pulled him over it. She went back over it, again and again, rolling him across the tip of it while her breath caught.

She let out a long breath through her nose.

Then she did the other one.

Max hung in her fingers and didn't say anything. Her chest was rising faster under him, and he knew without being told whose hands she was thinking about.

She went lower.

Down the wet crease between her tits. Down her belly in lazy circles, around her navel, over the stretch marks. The water ran ahead of him, through the dark curls and down between her thighs.

He thought she would stop there.

She didn't stop.

She spread her feet on the tile, a little, and brought him down through the curls. They were thick and wet and sleek with soap, and they dragged across his face and caught in his mouth. Then the curls thinned out and there was only skin, slick and hot and swollen, and she was pushing him flat against the front of her pussy.

Her lips were full and dark and parted, fat with blood, wide enough to lie across. They gave under him and folded around his sides and closed back over him as she moved him. She worked him up through them, from the bottom to the top, and at the top there was a hard little knot of flesh under its hood, the size of his fist and as hot as a coal, and when his chest bumped it, her whole body jerked.

"Mm," she said, to nobody.

She did it again. And then she stopped pretending she was washing anything.

She held him flat with two fingers and rubbed him up and down between her lips, right over her clit, then in little circles on top of it. The soap was gone. What was on him now wasn't soap. It was thick and slippery and it smelled of her, salty and sharp and musky, stronger than the briefs, stronger than the drawer, stronger than Izzy. It got in his nose and his eyes and his hair, the hair she'd just washed. Her lips opened and swallowed him to the shoulders and closed on him and opened again. Her thighs came in from both sides and clamped on her own hand, so he was locked in heat on every side, hot flesh above and below and around him and her fingers grinding him into it.

Her hips started to rock.

He'd get a gulp of steam and then his face would go back under, into wet folds that pulsed against his cheek. He could feel every twitch of her thighs, every catch in her breath. She'd put her other hand flat on the tile wall to hold herself up.

"Mm. Bea," she breathed. Or something with the same shape. It wasn't for him.

It went on for five minutes. Longer. Long enough for him to stop fighting and just hang in her grip and get dragged through her, over and over, his face full of her, his own breathing gone ragged in a way that had nothing to do with the water. He was so ashamed he could feel it in his teeth. He'd come in here to be held. He'd said just with you, and now he was a toy she was rubbing on her clit while she thought about the president of Ventus.

And he was hard.

He'd been hard since her nipple, and every stroke went right up his spine. He hated how much he didn't want her to stop.

Her hips stuttered. She made a sound, high and small, in the back of her throat.

Then she froze.

Hips, thighs, fingers. For one long second the only thing moving was the water, and he lay between her lips with her clit throbbing against his chest and waited.

She opened her eyes.

She pulled him out and brought him up fast, so the bathroom swung around him. Her face had gone dark red, up to her hairline and down her neck, so the mark from Bea nearly disappeared into it.

"Oh my God," Victoria said. "Oh my God. Mijo. Mama's sorry. Mama's so sorry, I don't know what—Mama wasn't—" She rinsed him under the spray with her thumb, fast and clumsy. "Mama wasn't thinking. Did Mama hurt you? Oh, sweetie, I'm so—"

She stopped.

She'd seen it. She was looking right at it, his dick sticking straight up off his stomach, red and stiff, in the middle of her palm.

Neither of them said anything.

He watched her decide. The mortification didn't go anywhere. It just went under, and something smoother came up over it.

"It's okay," Victoria said. Her voice was very calm. "Mama knows. Mama doesn't mind."

She said it the way she'd said it about the sectional smelling of feet. And he understood that it wasn't just for him. If he was okay, then she was okay. If this was something boys his size just did, then she hadn't done anything at all.

"Okay," Max said.

She brought him back to her chest and laid him over her heart, where she'd started, with her palm across his back. Her heart was still going hard. So was he. The water ran down between them, and her tits rose and fell under him, a little too fast, and neither of them mentioned it. After a while, she started humming again. She got the tune wrong.

hm

He didn't know which of them it came from.

*

He didn't hear Izzy over the water. The first thing he knew was cold air rolling in through the steam, and Victoria's hand going tight across his back. The bathroom door, which she always left ajar, was all the way open, and Izzy was standing in it.

She was in Miguel's tank top again. Her hair was a mess. She had her phone in one hand, the screen still lit, and her mouth was open on the start of a sentence. "Mom, did you get my text about the—"

She stopped.

Through the fogged glass he watched her look at her mother, naked against the tile, and at the hand on Victoria's chest, and at what was under it. He lay there against Victoria's tit, still hard, and didn't try to move.

Victoria didn't let go of him. She didn't turn off the water. She shut her eyes, as if that settled it.

"Hi, mija," she said. "Close the door, you're letting the cold in."

Max had been watching Izzy's face for four years, waiting for the smirk, and he knew every version of it. He waited for it now.

It didn't come.

Izzy looked at the empty soap dish on the blue caddy. At the body wash on the shelf. At her mother's face, which was still red to the hairline. Then at him.

"He asked," she said.

She'd been on the stairs. She'd heard every word.

She didn't close the door.

She stood there one second longer. Then she went, and he heard her in the bedroom, and then on the stairs, and then the front door.