Beach Day With Lillian Giantess/Shrinking & Farts chapter 4 by maximally

By the time they reached the beach, the cloud cover had begun to break apart. The parking lot smelled of salt, warm asphalt, and somebody’s breakfast from the café across the road. Under that, faintly, the car when Lillian opened her door.

 

“There.” She set the case on the hood and opened the clasp. “Fresh air.”

 

Max stood carefully. The wind caught his shirt, and for a moment he just let it. Then he looked down. The hood curved away beneath the case. Beyond it was a drop he preferred not to think about.

 

“Very scenic,” he said. “Could somebody get me off the car?”

 

Blaise held out his hand. This time, Max stepped onto it himself.

 

The girls started for the restrooms on the far side of the lot. Lillian paused, eyed Max on Blaise’s palm, and made a little gimme gesture.

 

“I’ll take him while we change. Two minutes.”

 

“Lil—”

 

“What? He’ll be fine.” She plucked Max up before the argument could grow a spine. “Be right back.”

 

The women’s room was damp concrete and peeling paint, already losing a fight with chlorine. Jen took one stall. Cindy took another. Lillian latched the last door, set Max on the cold curve of the toilet seat, and started peeling the yoga pants down like she was doing him a favor.

 

“Ugh, it smells like chlorine in here,” Jen said.

 

brrrrttttt

 

“How about now?” Cindy asked, delighted. The smell arrived a beat later, sharp and eggy, bouncing off tile.

 

“Don’t give me any ideas,” Lillian called back, oddly concentrated. “I’ve been holding one since we parked.”

 

Max stayed mute. From the seat, she was the same problem she’d been all year: pale, bottom-heavy, D-cups fighting the crop top, hips that made the stall feel small. The pants came off with a long, wet sound of trapped sweat — a slick peel that left a shiny print on both cheeks and a darker stripe down the crack where the morning had lived. The thong followed, snapping off one hip, then the other. She hung both on the hook like they were evidence.

 

She bent over the beach bag.

 

The deep shadowed cleft of her ass rose until it was the whole foreground — sun-warmed skin, synthetic cotton, the sour-sweet personal weather that had been baking into him since breakfast. A bead of sweat ran down the split and disappeared into the pucker. The hole winked when she shifted her weight. Heat came off her in a sheet. Up close he could see the faint pink pressure marks the yoga pants had left, and the way each cheek had its own weather system.

 

He looked. Of course he looked. That was the trap, and also the truth. He could want to stare and still want her to put him back in the case. His cock made the staring worse. It always did. Lillian’s ass was a stupid, unfair fact, and his body kept trying to write a review.

 

“Most guys would pay good money for a private show like this,” she said over her shoulder. She reached back and spread herself with two fingers, casual as adjusting a strap. The crack opened. Musk rolled out, thick enough to coat the back of his throat — sweat, thong, bean dip, skin that had been in yoga pants since she woke up. “Hello? Earth to Max? You’re supposed to clap or something.”

 

Max did not clap.

 

She backed up half a step anyway. The pale undersides of her cheeks filled the stall. If she sat now, the toilet would not be the problem. He would.

 

“Lillian, you good in there?” Jen, knowing.

 

“One sec. Max is being shy.”

 

“I’m not—”

 

“See? Shy.”

 

Her stomach rolled, liquid and low. The cheeks tightened. The stall air went still in that particular way Max had learned to dread.

 

“Uh oh,” Cindy said. “Hold on, Max!”

 

BBBRRRUUUUMMMMMBLLLLLE—PPPWWWWAAARRRPP

 

The stall went white with noise. The blast shoved him back against porcelain; a wet edge of it slapped his chest and kept going, a hot, greasy shove that made his shirt cling. The smell arrived as a single vicious fact — beans, dairy, burrito, the particular sour of Lillian unconcerned, a swampy personal musk underneath that no amount of chlorine was going to touch. It got in his mouth. It got in his eyes. His lungs tried to opt out. His cock twitched in the middle of the disaster, traitor to the end. Somewhere beyond the door Jen swore, gagged, and laughed all at once. Cindy said she could taste it.

 

“God damn, Lillian!” Jen waved a hand on the other side of the partition. “That’s heinous! Even for you!”

 

“Eww, I can taste that!” Cindy giggled. “C’mon, Jen, let’s get outta here before she does a sequel!”

 

Lillian straightened, sighed like someone who had finished a chore, and looked down at him on his knees. A last little ppt escaped her, almost polite, and still found his face.

 

“Sequel’s included,” she said, and scooped him up.

 

She did not put him in the bikini first. She sat him in the open crack with two fingers, mashed the cheeks together around him, and held him there while she stepped into the bottoms. Flesh closed. Sweat sealed it. The bikini snapped over him, tight as a second lid, and then she did a little squat to settle the fit. Max’s world went dark, hot, and damp. His nose was in the hole. His hands were nowhere useful. When she clenched, the walls moved in and the leftover stall-fart had nowhere to go except through him.

 

She shook her hips once because she liked the way he squirmed. Then she did it again.

 

“Let’s go get some sun, fart boy.” The words traveled through her ass. “Try not to melt.”

 

Outside, Blaise was still standing by the bag. He had forgotten his trunks.

 

They were still discussing the precise location of the abandoned swimwear when the girls came back across the lot. Jen offered to accompany him to the little shop near the parking lot. Blaise looked at the prices in its window and decided that sitting on the beach had its own merits. Cindy called him cheap.

 

“Correct,” he said.

 

They started for the sand. Lillian walked like the argument did not include her, which meant Max went with her: heat, wet fabric, the clap of her cheeks, salt air he could smell and not reach. Every step packed him a little deeper into the line of the crack. The stall was still clinging to both of them.

 

Jen’s gaze dropped to Lillian’s bikini. 

 

“Where’s Max?”

 

Lillian turned, presented the seat of it, and patted. A faint, indignant sound came from somewhere inside. She clenched once, playful, then again in a slow grind that mashed him deeper into the wet line. Max made another noise he would also deny.

 

“Fresh air,” she said.

 

Blaise winced. “Dude.”

 

“What? He’s warmer than he would be in the case. And he already got the tour.” She bounced on her heels. The cheeks clapped. Max’s world clapped with them. “See? He’s fine. He’s squirming. That’s how you know.”

 

“It’s gotta be a hundred and twenty degrees in there.”

 

“One-thirty, easy,” Cindy offered, unhelpfully.

 

Lillian rolled her eyes, made a performance of inconvenience, and hooked two fingers under the wet fabric. The bikini peeled away from the crack with a sound Max would remember later whether he wanted to or not. Max came out blinking, slick with her, hair glued down, a shiny streak of her sweat from collar to hip. The parking-lot wind hit him like he’d invented weather. He smelled like the stall. He smelled like her. His shirt was a lost cause.

 

“Don’t get used to this,” she told him, and dropped him into Blaise’s palm. A last little ppt escaped the open bikini and drifted past his face on the way down, like a souvenir.

 

Air. Actual air. Salt, asphalt, leftover chlorine, and Lillian fading instead of surrounding him. He took it in like he’d invented it.

 

“You okay?” Blaise asked.

 

“Define okay.”

 

“Yeah. Fair.”

 

They found a patch of sand far enough from the water that Lillian wouldn’t have to move their things every ten minutes. Cindy unfolded an umbrella. Jen spread the towels, leaving space for Blaise beside hers. Lillian dropped her bag directly onto the towel Max had been about to step onto.

 

He stopped.

 

She didn’t notice.

 

Blaise moved the bag.

 

“Here,” he said, setting Max down near the edge. “This bit’s yours.”

 

The towel was blue, with a faded white stripe along one side. Max walked a short distance across it, enjoying the novelty of choosing a direction without immediately encountering a wall, or a cheek.

 

Jen crouched beside them and placed a cap of water near his feet.

 

“That’s for drinking,” she said. “Don’t let Lillian say I never do anything for you.”

 

“I heard that.”

 

“You were meant to.”

 

Cindy settled nearby and resumed the argument she’d been having with the group chat all morning. A recent anime adaptation had, in her view, committed several crimes against the source material, including a romance that had not existed, a villain who had, and an ending that appeared to have been written by someone who had only read the back cover.

 

Max hadn’t seen the anime, but he had read the manga before college.

 

“They cut the library scene,” he said.

 

Cindy turned toward him so fast her glasses slipped.

 

“Yes! That’s exactly—” She pointed at him, then at Blaise, then at the ocean, as if the water needed to be informed. “He gets it. The library scene is the whole point. If you take that out, the last act is just people standing in rooms explaining feelings.”

 

“Which is what they did,” Max said.

 

“Which is what they did!”

 

For the next few minutes, he was permitted to be right about something.

 

It was surprisingly pleasant. The bikini heat was still on his skin. The stall smell was still in his hair. Neither of those facts managed to ruin a correct point about an ending. Cindy talked with her hands. Jen passed Blaise sunscreen and watched him forget how wrists worked. Lillian stretched out on her stomach, the bikini doing structural work, cheeks spreading until the fabric vanished into the crack, and contributed the useful observation that the actress had a great ass, which Cindy accepted as legally irrelevant and personally true. A lazy bbbbrt escaped her into the towel. She did not apologize. She reached back and fanned it toward Max like a joke he was supposed to rate.

 

Max sat on his corner of towel and drank water someone had remembered to give him.

 

For a stretch of minutes he wasn’t Jordana’s little guy. He was just Max, having an argument about anime.

 

Eventually, Jen persuaded the others to go down to the water. Lillian stood, stretched until the bikini threatened resignation, and looked at Blaise.

 

“Last chance.”

 

“I’ll survive.”

 

“Try not to have too much fun without us.”

 

Her gaze briefly found Max.

 

“And don’t wander off.”

 

He looked out over the broad, uneven landscape between their towel and the nearest trash can.

 

“I’ll cancel my plans.”

 

She laughed and followed Jen toward the surf. A casual ppprrbbt escaped her as she went, tossed over her shoulder like a wave. Cindy lingered long enough to tell Max that the video she’d sent Lillian covered his point at minute twenty-three.

 

“Good to know.”

 

“Twenty-three forty, actually.”

 

Then she hurried after the others, leaving Blaise and Max alone.

 

*

 

Blaise started the sandcastle almost by accident.

 

He was sitting with his knees drawn up, scooping damp sand out of a shallow hole and packing it into a mound. After a while, Max wandered over to inspect his work.

 

“What’s that supposed to be?”

 

“A castle.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

Blaise looked at the mound.

 

“It’ll have towers.”

 

“That should help.”

 

“Everyone’s a critic.”

 

He packed another handful onto one side. It immediately slumped into the hole.

 

Max folded his arms.

 

“Your foundations are bad.”

 

“My architect’s very expensive.”

 

“I work for phone privileges.”

 

Blaise’s smile faltered slightly.

 

Max wished he hadn’t said it.

 

Then Blaise reached for the empty plastic cup beside the cooler.

 

“Alright. Show me.”

 

They moved to a patch of firmer sand near the towel. Blaise filled the cup, pressed it down, and lifted it carefully. The resulting tower held together.

 

Max walked around it.

 

“Better.”

 

“High praise.”

 

They built a second tower, then a third. Blaise made the walls while Max worked closer to the ground, scraping doorways and narrow windows into the damp surface with a broken bit of shell.

 

Before long, they had acquired a division of labor.

 

“Gatehouse?” Blaise asked.

 

“Between those two.”

 

“Moat?”

 

“Eventually. Wide. With a sign.”

 

“What kind of sign?”

 

Max dragged the shell through a damp patch and carved letters too small for Blaise to read without leaning in.

 

“No farts.”

 

Blaise snorted so hard he collapsed a turret. “That’s not how moats work.”

 

“It’s how this one works.”

 

They rebuilt the turret. Blaise packed. Max detailed, carving a tiny crest into the top — not a real one, just a shape that looked like it meant something if you didn’t look too closely.

 

“So what’s this one?” Blaise asked. “The tower, I mean.”

 

“The fart-proof bunker.”

 

“Is it?”

 

“No. But the brochure says it is.”

 

“That’s fraud.”

 

“That’s hospitality.”

 

Blaise packed a lopsided annex onto the back.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Employee of the month office.”

 

“Who’s employee of the month?”

 

Max pointed the shell at him. “You. You carry stuff.”

 

“Vital.”

 

“Vital.”

 

They gave the annex a plaque. The plaque was a pebble. Blaise dubbed the whole thing Fort Whatever, and Max felt no desire to workshop the name. He used a second shell as a trowel and kept the first for windows.

 

The work required enough concentration that Max gradually stopped checking the water for Lillian. He climbed onto a low wall, corrected an uneven edge, and leaned back to judge the spacing of the windows. The sun was warm. The waves were better company than a gurgling stomach. For a stretch of minutes he was not a liner, or a lucky charm, or fresh air in a box.

 

At this size, he could get the details right.

 

For once, that was useful.

 

He’d spent hours doing this sort of thing in games: building a base, deciding it looked wrong, demolishing half of it, starting again. He used to stay up much too late adjusting details nobody else would ever notice.

 

Now Blaise was waiting for him to finish a doorway before attaching the next section of wall.

 

“Sorry,” Max said. “Nearly done.”

 

“No rush.”

 

There wasn’t, apparently.

 

Max widened the doorway a little.

 

Blaise watched him work, a faint smile on his face. “You know, you’re pretty good at this.”

 

“Thanks,” said Max, not looking up from his work. “I used to be big into crafting games before all this.”

 

“Before all what?”

 

“You know.” Max gestured to himself. “This.”

 

“Oh.” Blaise’s smile faded. “Sorry.” He hesitated, clearly mentally kicking himself. “Did you still want to take a look at my phone?”

 

For once, Max didn’t have to ask.

 

Blaise took it out.

 

“What did you want to look up?”

 

Max had thought about that question for much of the drive. Now that somebody had finally asked it, several answers crowded together and briefly prevented him from saying any of them. Zuemy. Serum. Lady’s Mount. A number he had never gotten. The version of the story Jordana told, and the version that had involved a gym bag.

 

“Ventus,” he said. “The wrestling team.”

 

Blaise typed, then lowered the screen.

 

The university’s crest appeared above a row of familiar colors.

 

Max moved closer.

 

“Can you scroll down?”

 

Blaise did.

 

“Stop.”

 

There she was.

 

Ursa Kolossovna, in a photograph that looked newer than the one Max remembered. Her hair was pulled back, and somebody had apparently convinced her to smile for the camera. She stood with two teammates Max didn’t recognize. She was still huge in the frame. She still looked like someone who would listen if you talked.

 

Max stared at it.

 

Under her name were numbers, results, the ordinary details of a season that had continued without him.

 

“You know her?” Blaise asked.

 

“Yeah.”

 

He waited, but Max didn’t immediately elaborate.

 

“She looked after me,” Max said eventually. “When it first happened.”

 

“Before J?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Blaise glanced at him.

 

Max kept looking at the picture. He had spent so long remembering Ursa that seeing a new photograph felt strange, almost intrusive. She’d had days since then. Matches. Haircuts, probably. Teammates who knew her number. Things he knew nothing about. Two days, and then a bus that smelled like Taco Bell, and then a house that thought he’d mailed himself.

 

“Could you save that page?”

 

“Sure.”

 

Blaise tapped the screen.

 

Max watched him do it.

 

He wanted to ask for more. He also wanted to know whether anything he told Blaise would remain between them. The phone was here, finally, and he couldn’t stop hearing the conversation from upstairs: Zuemy talks to Lillian. Lillian, who had just worn him like a liner and called it sun.

 

Blaise waited.

 

“That’s it?” he asked.

 

“For now.”

 

“Okay.” He hesitated. “That reminds me… about this whole… Zuemy thing. I’ve been meaning to talk to her. It’s just… complicated.”

 

“It’s always complicated, Blaise,” Max sighed. “I’m three inches tall and I live in a terrarium that smells like stale farts. My whole life is a complication.”

 

“I know,” said Blaise, running a hand through his messy black hair. “But… I don’t know. Maybe it’s not all bad? I mean, you’ve got… You know… a place to live. And… uh…” He floundered, searching for a silver lining.

 

“I get to live in a house with a bunch of big, sexy women?” Max offered dryly.

 

“Yeah! I mean…” Blaise shook his head. “Never mind. Bad pep talk. My bad.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

They added a courtyard. Then a staircase, which Max immediately regretted suggesting because carving each step took ages. Blaise shaded the section with his hand while he worked.

 

From the water came a distant burst of laughter.

 

Max barely registered it; he was trying to decide whether the highest tower needed a flag.

 

“Gift shop,” Blaise said, packing one last lump onto the outer wall.

 

Max laughed again, in spite of himself.

 

“We should take a picture,” he said.

 

“Yeah.” Blaise glanced at his phone, then at the unfinished parapet. “When you’re done with that bit.”

 

Max nodded and bent back over the wall.

 

He did not see her coming until Blaise said, “Oh, no.”

 

“KAIJU ATTACK!”

 

Lillian was coming toward them at a run, her bikini straining heroically against her colossal frame. Her emerald eyes were locked on the castle, and a playful, wicked grin was spreading across her face. Jen and Cindy followed behind her, laughing and shaking their heads, well aware of what was coming. She had both hands raised in an approximation of claws and the delighted expression Max had learned to associate with an idea she hadn’t examined very closely.

 

“Lillian,” Blaise warned.

 

She slowed beside the castle and looked down.

 

“Oh, wow. You actually built a whole thing.”

 

“We’re still building it.”

 

“That’s what they all say.”

 

She raised a foot over the outer wall. Wet sand darkened between her toes. The shadow of her ass, still dripping, fell across the courtyard like weather.

 

Max froze on the tower.

 

“Hold on,” Blaise said sharply. “He’s still on it.”

 

Lillian glanced toward Max.

 

For a moment, nobody moved.

 

Then she grinned like that had been the missing piece.

 

“Even better.”

 

Blaise brought his hand alongside the tower. Max started to step onto it.

 

Lillian got there first.

 

Her fingers plucked him off the parapet with the same casual pinch she used on chips. He lost the shell. She turned, hooked a thumb in the wet bikini, and stuffed him into the crack on the way down — not under a heel, which even Lillian seemed to understand was a different kind of joke, but into the place she always put him when she wanted him both safe and included.

 

“Lil, seriously—”

 

Her heel came down on the gatehouse.

 

Wet sand pushed outward in a thick ridge. One of the front towers split down the middle and folded into the courtyard. The no-farts sign vanished first, which Max tried not to take personally.

 

Then she turned, dropped her weight, and sat on what was left of the walls with a wet whump that sent grit flying.

 

Max went with her.

 

The keep vanished under the bikini. The fart-proof bunker lasted half a second. The employee-of-the-month office became a smear. Lillian’s ass hit the ruins like weather, and Max hit the ruins inside Lillian’s ass: heat, wet fabric, sand grinding into the crack around him, two dripping cheeks settling until the castle was a cushion and he was the part of the joke that couldn’t get out. She wriggled once to get comfortable. Sand packed in. The walls of her closed. Then he heard another low, liquid gurgle — more ominous than any tidal wave.

 

BBBBBRRRRRAAAAAAAAPPPPP

 

Ten long seconds. Breakfast coming home to die. The blast had nowhere to go except into the crater and through the crack, a hot bean-sour sheet that saturated the sand and Max both. He couldn’t breathe anything that hadn’t just left her. The world went white, then swamp-brown, then just Lillian — salt, sweat, burrito, the stall still living on her skin. His ears rang. His body took the pressure as information.

 

“KAIJU WINS,” Lillian announced, delighted.

 

She lifted off, still grinning, and flattened the staircase with a second step. Sand filled the doorway Max had just finished. Then she hooked two fingers under the bikini, peeled him out of the crack, and set him in the stinking pit like a rescued civilian.

 

“You alright?” She said it like a statement, not a question.

 

Max sat there. Sand in his shirt. Her sweat cooling on him. The ruins still shaped like her ass.

 

He knew it was a sandcastle. He knew what sandcastles were for, and that the tide would eventually have dealt with it even if Lillian hadn’t. He knew she thought this was the joke, the same way she thought everything about his life was a joke.

 

Jen and Cindy reached them as Lillian stepped back to admire the damage.

 

“Defeated,” Lillian announced, and bowed to the stinking crater. A last little ppt escaped her over Max’s head, almost like a curtain call.

 

“Some battle! That dumb castle didn’t even put up a fight!” Cindy laughed once, then stopped. “Wait… how did you make those windows?”

 

Blaise looked at the wreckage.

 

“Very carefully.”

 

“I can tell.” Lillian sniffed, wrinkled her nose at her own aftermath, and looked proud of it anyway. “Tragic loss.”

 

Normally, Max would have found something to say. A complaint she could laugh at, or a joke that let the whole thing end without anybody needing to wonder whether he was upset.

 

He couldn’t think of one quickly enough.

 

Lillian looked at him.

 

“Oh, come on. Don’t look like that.”

 

Max kept his eyes on the broken tower.

 

“I was going to take a picture,” he said.

 

Cindy crouched beside the ruins. One section of wall remained intact near the back, with three narrow windows beneath an uneven parapet. The rest smelled like Lillian’s breakfast meeting the tide.

 

“You did all those?”

 

Max nodded.

 

“With what?”

 

“A shell.”

 

She found it half-buried beside the fallen tower and lifted it carefully.

 

Lillian’s smile had become less certain.

 

“We can build another one.”

 

“Then somebody’ll knock it over,” Max said.

 

She opened her mouth, then glanced at Blaise.

 

He wasn’t smiling either.

 

“It was a joke.”

 

“I know.”

 

Max was tired of knowing that.

 

Jen touched Lillian’s arm.

 

“Come help me with the umbrella. It’s about to get blown away.”

 

For a second, Lillian seemed ready to continue the argument. Then she looked toward the towel and shrugged.

 

“Fine. Sorry about your castle.”

 

She said it lightly enough that Max couldn’t tell how much of it she meant. A last little ppt escaped her as she walked away, almost apologetic, which somehow made it worse.

 

Jen went with her.

 

Cindy stayed a moment longer, turning the little shell between her fingers.

 

“For what it’s worth,” she told Max, “the windows were really good.”

 

She set his tool down on the towel.

 

Then she followed the others.

 

Blaise lowered his hand beside the ruined courtyard.

 

“Where do you want to go?”

 

Max looked at the sandcastle, then at the towel.

 

“Over there.”

 

Blaise moved him.

 

Max sat beside the shell. He brushed a grain of sand from his sleeve, missed it, and tried again. He still smelled like the stall. The ruins still smelled like the encore. Neither fact was the one that mattered.

 

For a while, neither of them said anything.

 

Behind them, Lillian was arguing with the umbrella. Cindy explained that it would work better if she stopped holding the mechanism shut. Jen laughed.

 

“Sorry,” Blaise said.

 

Max let his hand fall.

 

“You didn’t do it.”

 

“I know. Still.”

 

Another pause.

 

“She gets carried away.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Blaise pulled his knees up.

 

“We could do another one further down. Before everybody wants to leave.”

 

Max looked toward the empty plastic cup.

 

A few minutes earlier, he would have liked that.

 

“Maybe.”