Max's Owner Returns Giantess/Shrinking & Farts chapter 3 by maximally

It was not Lillian.

 

Max knew that before the door finished opening, because it didn't so much open as get out of the way. And the shadow that fell across the desk didn’t stop there. It kept going, up the wall and most of the way to the ceiling.

 

Jordana Oliveira had come home early.

 

At six-foot-eleven and four hundred and forty pounds, the former captain of the Lady’s Mount wrestling team had to duck under the doorframe, and she did it the way she did everything else: without any apparent concern for whatever was unlucky enough to be in her way. She was still in her gym clothes: black compression leggings that had been painted onto a pair of thighs like tree trunks, and a cropped black LMU tank top that looked almost modest on her—the way a pair of bowling balls looks modest next to a pair of hot-air balloons.

 

Because behind her, of course, was the ass.

 

Wider than the doorway she’d just squeezed through. Wider, Max suspected, than the desk he was sitting on. Two pale, colossal globes of cushioned muscle and softer padding, the leggings stretched so thin over them that the fabric had gone from black to a kind of bruised charcoal gray. Sweat had darkened a line straight down the middle. The whole thing swayed half a second behind her, like it had its own commute.

 

Her face was far from forgettable, too. Pale as milk, a sharp jaw, full lips with a permanent half-smirk, and green eyes, Lillian’s emerald eyes, only colder, like somebody had left them in the freezer.

 

“Morning,” he said.

 

“’Sup.” Jordana dropped a gym bag the size of a sedan on the floor, kicked it vaguely toward the closet, and missed. “Miss me?”

 

“You’ve been gone three hours.”

 

“That’s a yes.” She dropped into the desk chair Blaise had left pulled out, and the chair made a noise Max had only ever heard in nature documentaries about glaciers. Her face came level with the terrarium. She sniffed the air above it—once, critically, like a sommelier. “Ugh. Lil was in here?”

 

“For a while.”

 

“Amateur.” She flicked the lid, still lying on the desk where Lillian had left it, and it spun lazily off the edge onto the carpet. She didn’t pick it up. She never picked it up. “What’d she give you? Bean dip?”

 

“Bean dip,” Max confirmed. “Twice.”

 

“Cute,” Jordana smirked: that slow, lazy, sideways smirk that always arrived a few seconds before something bad happened to him. “You know she’s only doing it ’cause I’m out. Little sister’s trying to mark her territory.”

 

“I’m not anyone’s territory.”

 

“Says the guy who lives in my hamster tank.”

 

He opened his mouth—then closed it. She had him there, technically, and she knew it. That was the thing about Jordana: she didn’t win arguments so much as sit on them until they stopped moving.

 

To celebrate her victory, she toed off her sneakers.

 

They hit the carpet one after the other, thud, thud, and the smell came up off them like steam off a manhole: rubber, sweat, and two hours of wet gym socks marinating in a closed shoe. Then she swung one leg up and planted her foot on the desk, right beside the terrarium, heel down, toes flexing.

 

The sock had once been white. It was now a damp, defeated gray, with a sweat-print of every toe pressed into the cotton like a fossil record. The foot itself was roughly the length of Max’s whole terrarium—size fifteen, if he had to guess, and he did not want to guess. Heat rolled off it in a visible shimmer. The plexiglass on that side began, very slowly, to fog.

 

“Ahhh,” Jordana sighed, wiggling her toes. “Leg day, bro. My dogs are barking.”

 

They were not barking, Max thought. They were screaming. In a language made entirely of cheese.

 

She scrunched her toes, and a fresh wave of foot-funk rolled across the open top of his tank—vinegar, wet dog, and something like old Parmesan left in a gym locker over a long weekend. He stepped back on the washcloth and pulled the collar of his shirt over his nose.

 

“What?” she said, noticing. “Brenda says my feet smell like hard work.”

 

“Brenda,” Max said, muffled, “has lost her sense of smell.”

 

“Brenda has a strong nose.” She wiggled the toes again, directly at him. “Comes from rooming with me.”

 

Max decided, firmly, to change the subject. “Weren’t you supposed to be at breakfast with Ariadne? And then the gym?”

 

“Did the gym. Ariadne bailed on breakfast. Something about helping her abuela at the flower shop. And Brenda’s doing a thing with her cousin till four.” She grinned at him. “So. I’m bored. And I’ve got a phone interview at noon.”

 

Max felt his stomach drop about three inches. He had been present—well, present was a strong word—for six of Jordana’s interviews since the spring, mostly as muffled voices and changes in temperature. Jordana claimed she interviewed better with him “in position.” She said it kept her focused. She said the struggling helped—“like one of those fidget things, but it screams.”

 

“It’s a phone interview,” Max tried. “They can’t even see you.”

 

“Exactly. Means I can do it in my leggings.” She shrugged. “A lucky charm’s a lucky charm, bro. You don’t mess with a system.”

 

“Your system has a zero percent success rate.”

 

“That’s ’cause I haven’t found the right job yet. Not ’cause of you.”

 

Before he could answer, her stomach let out a long, low, gurgling complaint, deeper than Lillian’s, slower, the sound of plumbing in an old building settling for the night.

 

Jordana heard it too. She looked down at her own belly, then at him, and the smirk widened.

 

“Oh, that’s gonna be a good one.” She patted her stomach like it was a pet that had done a trick. “Protein shake. Plus whatever Brenda put in the burrito last night. I swear to God that girl puts cheese on cheese.”

 

“You could—” Max swallowed. “You could go to the bathroom. It’s a really good invention. Really ahead of its time.”

 

“Nah.” She stood. The chair sighed in relief. “Where’s the fun in that?”

 

*

 

She didn’t pick him up right away.

 

That was the worst part about Jordana. Worse than the size, worse than the smell, worse even than the farts. She took her time. She liked the anticipation. She turned around, slowly, and that colossal ass rose over the edge of the desk like a pale charcoal moon coming up over the horizon, and she just let it hang there, a foot from the open top of his terrarium, close enough that he could feel the heat coming off her leggings like a radiator.

 

“Lil gets a close-up,” she said over her shoulder, “so I get a close-up. That’s only fair.”

 

“That’s not what fair means.”

 

“Shh. Ground zero’s talking.”

 

She bent forward, braced her hands on her knees, and lowered. The two cheeks, each one roughly the size of the sofa in his old dorm, filled the whole sky above the terrarium. The crack, a deep gray canyon of stretched spandex, settled directly over the open top. The stained plexiglass walls fogged in a ring where her heat hit them.

 

“Jordana—”

 

“Three,” she said cheerfully. “Two—”

 

She didn’t say one.

 

BBBBBBRRRRRRRUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

 

It wasn’t a sound so much as a change in the weather. The walls of the terrarium buzzed. The bottle cap of water skittered sideways and tipped over. The blast hit the top of the tank like a fist and came down through the opening in a thick, roiling column, and Max, who had been standing (a rookie mistake), went flat on his back on the washcloth.

 

Then the smell.

 

Rotten eggs, first—not the faint eggy ghost from the night before, but a full fresh dozen cracked open in a hot car. Then sour, curdled protein shake, chalky and vanilla-scented in a way that made it so much worse. And underneath it all, the deep, greasy, cheese-on-cheese funk of Brenda’s burrito, finally finishing the journey it had started at one in the morning.

 

His eyes watered instantly. His throat closed. He rolled onto his side and coughed until he saw spots—big green ones, the color of her eyes.

 

Jordana stayed right where she was, hovering, letting the cloud settle into every corner of the tank like she was filling a balloon.

 

“Ohhh, yeah.” She sighed, deeply satisfied. “Mmm. That’s better.”

 

“I—” Max wheezed. “I can’t—”

 

“Can’t what? Can’t believe how good that was? I know, bro. I know.” She reached back and gave her own cheek a pat that sent a second, smaller shockwave through the leggings.

 

 

That one was little, wet, and almost conversational—like a footnote. It drifted down onto him with all the gentleness of a warm, damp sock.

 

His cock, as usual, had not been consulted. It stood at attention anyway.

 

Jordana noticed. Of course she noticed. She glanced down over her shoulder, through the gap between her own thighs, and her eyebrows went up.

 

“Wow. Okay.” She laughed—a big, rough, delighted laugh that shook the desk. “And Lil thinks she’s the favorite.”

 

“That’s—” He covered himself, which at three inches tall with both hands was an act of pure optimism. “That’s a medical reaction.”

 

“Sure it is, little guy.”

 

*

 

Downstairs, a door slammed, and Lillian’s voice came up the stairwell like a siren.

 

“J? Is that you? Was that you?”

 

Jordana straightened, turning toward the door with the bored, heavy-lidded expression of a lioness who’d just heard a cub try to roar. “Who else, dork?”

 

“You’re home? I thought you were at the gym!”

 

“I was at the gym! Now I’m home!”

 

Footsteps thundered on the stairs. Then Lillian was in the doorway, still in the neon pink yoga pants, beach bag over one shoulder, Blaise visible over her head on the landing, looking like a man who’d just walked into the wrong movie. Lillian wrinkled her nose. Then she wrinkled it harder.

 

“Oh my God. You gassed him.”

 

“I gassed him.”

 

“I gassed him first.”

 

“And I gassed him better.” Jordana didn’t even look at her. She crouched—the floor groaned—and scooped up the fallen lid and dropped it back on the desk, upside down, a full foot from the terrarium. It was, as far as Max could tell, the most effort she’d ever expended on the lid. “Second place is first loser, Lil. Learn it.”

 

Lillian’s eyes narrowed. Jordana was the only person on Earth who could pin her to a carpet and make her tap—and both of them knew it. She put both hands on her hips.

 

“We’re taking him to the beach.”

 

“You took him to the beach Tuesday.”

 

“So? He likes the beach.”

 

Max, who did not have strong feelings about the beach so much as strong feelings about Lillian’s swimsuit, wisely said nothing.

 

“Nope.” Jordana tapped the desk next to his terrarium with one long finger. Tap. Tap. Like she was marking a deposit. “I’ve got an interview at noon. He’s on duty.”

 

“A phone interview,” Lillian said. “He doesn’t have to be in your pants for a phone interview.”

 

“That’s what I said,” Max added, faintly.

 

“Nobody asked you, dude.” Jordana didn’t take her eyes off her sister. “It’s my little guy. My call.”

 

Lillian lunged for the terrarium.

 

Jordana was faster. She’d been faster her whole life. One huge pale hand scooped Max out of the tank, and before Lillian’s fingers had even closed on empty air, Jordana had hooked a thumb in the neckline of her sports bra, stretched it out, and dropped him straight down the front.

 

Max fell into the dark.

 

He landed in a hot, damp valley between two enormous, pillowy breasts, mashed flat by black spandex that had been engineered to hold things in place during a fireman’s carry. It held him in place. It held him in place very, very well. The sweat in here was a different flavor from her feet—softer, saltier, faintly sweet, with a trace of the vanilla protein shake that she had apparently spilled down her front at some point and never bothered to wipe off. Her heartbeat thumped against his back like a bass drum at a frat party.

 

“Stash,” Jordana announced, folding her arms over her chest, which squished him like a panini. “Come and get him.”

 

“That’s cheating!”

 

“That’s strategy.”

 

Lillian glared. Then—slowly, deliberately, the way a chess player might move a queen—she turned around, bent over, and pointed her pink yoga-pants-clad ass directly at her sister’s face.

 

“Lil,” said Blaise, from the landing, with the voice of a man who had seen this before. “Don’t.”

 

Lillian did.

 

 

It was long and loud and wet, and it hit Jordana at point-blank range. Even from inside the sports bra, Max caught the edge of it as it rolled up over her collarbone: bean dip, egg, and the sour, beachy funk of a girl who had spent all morning eating chips in a car.

 

Jordana didn’t flinch. She didn’t blink. She inhaled—deeply, theatrically, like she was smelling a fine wine—and then let it out.

 

“Cute,” she said. “Was that your best?”

 

Lillian straightened, red-faced, sputtering. “It was a good one!”

 

“It was a warm-up.” Jordana patted her chest, which squished Max again. “He just tanked one of mine from six inches. You’re gonna have to do a lot better than that, baby sis.”

 

On the landing, Blaise cleared his throat. “Uh. J. Maybe—maybe he could just stay here? In the tank? Like, nobody takes him?”

 

Both Oliveira sisters turned and looked at Blaise.

 

Blaise seemed to shrink about an inch—not literally, which in this house was a meaningful distinction.

 

“Or not,” he said. “Just a thought.”

 

*

 

In the end, it went to a vote, if you could call it that.

 

Lillian argued. Jordana yawned, and reminded her, in a perfectly calm voice, of a specific incident from Lillian’s ninth-grade year involving a sleepover and a beanbag chair—an incident whose details Max did not catch but which turned Lillian the exact shade of her yoga pants.

 

“That’s not fair,” Lillian hissed.

 

“Life’s not fair,” said Jordana, who was six-foot-eleven and had never once in her life had to stand on a chair to reach anything.

 

Lillian picked up her bag. At the door, she turned back and pointed at the Max-shaped lump in Jordana’s sports bra.

 

“Text me if she kills you.”

 

“I don’t have a phone.”

 

“Then, like—haunt me.”

 

Jordana, with an air of enormous generosity, fished him out of her sports bra and set him back on the desk outside the tank so he could “say goodbye.”

 

Lillian said goodbye with her ass.

 

She backed up to the desk, rose up onto her toes, and planted one enormous pink cheek directly against him—not hard, just enough to mash him flat against the cool wood under a warm, soft, sweat-damp mountain of spandex. It was like being hugged by a beanbag that had been left in the sun. She held it there for a long, lingering second, and wiggled.

 

“Something to remember me by,” she said.

 

 

The little one came out right on top of him—short, wet, and smug. A souvenir.

 

Then she peeled away and was gone, and Max lay on the desk, faintly pink-scented, and stared at the ceiling.

 

“Bye,” he said, to nobody.

 

Jordana scooped him up and dropped him back into the tank like a kid putting away a toy.

 

She left. Blaise lingered half a step on the landing, meeting Max’s eyes through the doorway. Something passed across his face—guilt, maybe, or the same thing it had been earlier. I just need to find the right time. Then Lillian called his name, and he went.

 

The door swung most of the way shut. Not all the way. Nobody in this house ever closed a door all the way.

 

*

 

Jordana sat back down in the desk chair. For a moment, she didn’t say anything—just looked at him, chin on her fist, the smirk gone flat.

 

Max, still on his back on the damp washcloth, looked back.

 

Usually she looked at him the way you’d look at your keys—briefly, to check they were where you’d left them. This was longer.

 

“You look like crap,” she said finally.

 

“Lillian said the same thing.”

 

“Yeah, well. She’s right for once.” Jordana frowned. She reached in, slower than usual, with one finger, and nudged the bottle cap upright. Water was mostly gone. She looked at it for a second, then at the empty saucer. “Mom feed you?”

 

“Lillian brought eggs.”

 

“That’s not food. That’s, like, a garnish.” She sat back. Drummed her fingers on the desk. Then, too casually: “Brenda was being a dick last night. Squeezing you. I told her to knock it off.”

 

Max blinked. “You did?”

 

“Don’t make it weird.” The smirk came back, fast, like a door slammed on a draft. “I just need you in one piece for interviews. Can’t focus with a busted charm. It’s, like, bad juju.”

 

“Right,” said Max. “Juju.”

 

“Juju,” she agreed firmly.

 

For a second, neither of them said anything.

 

It was, he thought, the closest thing to an apology he had gotten from Jordana Oliveira in eleven months. He filed it away carefully, the way he’d filed away Ursa’s promise to look after him: a small thing, worth almost nothing, that he was not going to let anybody take.

 

Then her stomach growled again.

 

Low. Long. Ominous. The kind of rumble that came up through the chair and the desk and the floor of the terrarium and rattled his teeth.

 

Jordana looked down at it. Then at him. And the smirk was back to full strength, wide and lazy and absolutely delighted.

 

“Well,” she said, standing up, peeling the waistband of the leggings away from her hip with one thumb. “Interview’s in forty minutes. Guess we better warm up.”

 

She plucked him out of the tank. Then she turned around, hooked her thumb in the back of the leggings, and peeled them down just far enough to show the top of her crack—a deep, pale canyon, dewy with gym sweat, flanked by two cheeks so wide they blotted out the window behind them. The heat hit him first. Then the smell: the morning’s workout, the night’s burrito, and the ghost of the blast from an hour ago, still living down there like a tenant who wouldn’t leave.

 

“Lucky spot,” she said. “Same as always. You know the drill.”

 

Max did know the drill. That was the worst part.

 

She held him over the opening by one leg, dangling him like a tea bag, and he could feel the damp warmth coming up off her skin.

 

Max had three options. He could beg. He could struggle, which she liked. Or he could do what he usually did, which was say something clever and get stuffed in anyway.