A Week with Veronica Shrunken First Semester: Teacher's Pet chapter 4 by maximally

Sunday morning she woke him the same way she would wake him for the rest of the week.

 

BBBBBRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPP

 

Max came up out of a thin, ugly sleep with his face mashed to Veronica's asshole and a fresh weather system pouring into him — probably not the thousandth fart he'd had to endure, even if it felt like it. After less than a day of breathing almost nothing but the giant dorm mother's fumes, the act of doing so was already a little less openly impossible. That was not the same thing as better. With his tiny face trapped squarely against her pucker, there was nothing to lessen the sound, the impact, or the smell. The fart was long, morning-thick, coffee already working from the night before, and it painted the inside of her panties like a sealed room. While Veronica continually told herself this was in the service of science, he couldn't shake the feeling that it was much more about helping her live out her most depraved, dommy fantasies than anything else.

 

"Inventory day," she said, once she had peeled him out and set him on the cotton pad on the desk. Toast. Water on a fingertip. The tank while she used the toilet, already a habit she had not named. "I am not running you to the lab hungover on fumes. I am going to see what a day in a house does to you when I am not slamming you into equipment."

 

She did not fuck him with her ass on Sunday. She also did not let him out of arm's reach.

 

*

 

Monday tried to be a workday.

 

Veronica dressed like the hard-ass again: white shirt, black skirt, stockings, pumps, glasses, the whole armor. Max went into the crack because that was where Monday lived. Office hours were written on a card on her door in the Chemistry building. She put him under the blotter first, then thought better of it, then closed him in her fist when the hallway got loud.

 

The knock came at 10:12.

 

"Dr. Maxwell?" A girl's voice, bright, too close. "It's Sydney. From the club? I just need the room reservation initialed. Lotte said if we don't get the lecture hall before Friday the Juno kids are going to take it againl."

 

Max felt Veronica's pulse jump against his ribs.

 

"One moment." Faculty voice. Bored. Perfect.

 

She opened the door a sliver, body blocking the gap, Max crushed silent in the dark of her hand against the side of her thigh. From the slit of hallway light he caught a pink twin-tail, glasses flash, the energy of a short girl who smiled with too many teeth.

 

"Calendar," Veronica said. "Leave it. I'll initial this afternoon."

 

"Can I just—" Sydney tried to lean. "Also, rumor thing, totally not official, but somebody in the common room swore they saw like, a little guy on the coffee table Saturday? Which is insane, right? Unless Juno dumped another one. If there's a live one on campus the club has first—"

 

"There is no live one on my coffee table." Flat. Final. A dorm mother ending a rumor. "If House Juno is leaving messes, take it up with Miss Ventus. Do not turn my house into a scavenger hunt."

 

Sydney's smile dimmed and then came back smaller. "Right. Yeah. Totally. Just the reservation."

 

Paper changed hands. The door shut. The lock didn't click, because office hours were office hours, but Veronica's fist did not open until the footsteps faded.

 

She set him on the desk blotter with two fingers and looked at him for a long second like he had become a bigger problem than a scale.

 

"You heard that," she said.

 

"Y-yeah."

 

"That club collects rumors the way they collect action figures." She adjusted her glasses. The professional face was back and thinner than yesterday. "If they decide you exist, I stop being the only person with a key. Do you understand what that means for you, or do you need it drawn?"

 

Max thought about pink hair and first claim and the nightstand full of plastic men. "I get it."

 

"Good." She scooped him again, not toward the lab this time, toward the waistband. "Then you stay where I put you, and you do not make noise when someone knocks. That is not a test. That is hygiene."

 

The rest of Monday was work she actually had: emails, a short meeting with the door closed, a lecture hall she walked through without teaching because someone had left the projector on. Max lived in the crack and learned the difference between a fart she used on purpose and a fart she dropped because she was thinking. The thinking ones were worse. They came out small and mean and stayed in the underwear with him.

 

*

 

Tuesday was numbers.

 

She ran him to the private lab before most of the building was awake, peeled him onto a clean tray, and started machines that had been chewing his Saturday samples overnight. Max sat against a bottle cap and watched her face more than the screens. He had learned that much already. Veronica Maxwell's mouth told you when a result was boring. Her eyes told you when it was not.

 

The first file came up. She went very still.

 

"Hmm," she said. "That's... interesting."

 

"What is it?"

 

"The serum you got dosed with doesn't match any of the serums we've got on file here." She said it to the monitor, then to him, and her cheeks were not even involved this time. "And we've got most of the big ones. Campus stock. The sloppy party variants. Two that Juno pretends they don't make. This is a custom job."

 

Max felt the Saturday night thought come back with better edges. Someone did this on purpose.

 

"So... what does that mean?" He hated how small the question came out. "For getting me back."

 

"It means I don't have a key on the ring." She was already writing, already building a list on a second page: party / Juno adjacency / black-market cook / not Ventus inventory. "It means whoever built this can cook. It means I want a name." A glance over the glasses. "It does not mean I have an antidote in a drawer. Don't look at me like I just found one."

 

"I wasn't—"

 

"You were."

 

She let him sit with it. The lab hummed. Somewhere a centrifuge ticked down.

 

"Custom is not the same as impossible," Veronica said, after a while. "Custom is a puzzle with fewer published answers. I will work it. You will remain available. In the meantime, you do not leave this building in anyone else's pocket, and you do not get found by a girl with twin-tails and a club budget."

 

She picked him up. Not rough. Not gentle. Filing.

 

"Secondary question for later in the week," she added, almost lightly, as she turned him toward the familiar dark of her waistband. "How much of your compliance is the compound, and how much of it is you." Her mouth ticked. "I intend to get a clean number on that too."

 

Max, against his will, thought about the cotton pad, the toast crumb, the bathroom rule, Sydney's smile in the door crack, and the fact that he had not screamed.

 

She put him away.

 

The underwear snapped. Her first Tuesday fart of the working morning arrived like punctuation.

 

pppfffoooooootttttt

 

"Noted," she said, to herself, or to him, or to the notebook she would open when she got back to the desk. "You're still interesting."

 

*

 

Wednesday she had a lecture she could not cancel.

 

Intro Chem, fifty minutes, a hall that smelled like dry-erase and energy drinks. Max went in before she put the mic on — waistband, then a last-second decision that parked him deeper, cheeks closed, underwear snapped, a three-inch secret sitting in the dark while a hundred students watched their dorm mother talk about equilibrium like her ass was not running a second class.

 

She used him as a valve.

 

That was the job, even before she named it. Coffee from the morning, plus whatever she had eaten standing up between office and hall, wanted out in the first ten minutes. She held it through a slide on Le Chatelier. She held it through a kid in the third row asking a question he had not earned. Then, mid-sentence, she shifted her weight on the stool behind the bench, clenched, and let a thin, vicious ribbon go where nobody but Max would ever have to smell it.

 

prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaap

 

Silent enough for the hall. Not silent inside the seam. Heat packed the nylon. His eyes watered against her pucker. She did not pause. She underlined a word on the tablet and kept talking about systems that resisted change.

 

After class, in the empty corridor, she put two fingers into the waistband, found his head, and pressed him once against the hole like a period.

 

"You were useful," she said. "Don't get precious about it."

 

*

 

Thursday was the secondary-effects day she had promised.

 

Private lab. Door locked. Notebook open to a clean header: compliance vs. compound — week one.

 

She did not ask him to make her cum. She had already graded that and found him wanting. What she wanted now was cleaner and worse.

 

Recovery time after a measured fart in a covered dish. Whether he reached for her finger when she offered water or waited to be told. Whether praise — a short, dry good — made him answer faster than a threat. Whether fear or arousal showed first on his face when she brought him back to the crack and held him there without pushing in.

 

Max tried to stay a person through it. He counted ceiling tiles. He thought about Zeke, about his mom's name, about the unaffiliated dorm and a login screen. His body kept turning in the other direction. By the third trial he was answering before she finished the question. By the fifth he hated how good good sounded in her mouth.

 

"Don't look at me like that," Veronica said, writing. "I am not hypnotizing you. I am counting." She glanced up over the glasses. "The count is not in your favor."

 

"That's the serum," he said. It came out too fast. "You said it might— secondary effects. Compliance. You said that."

 

"I said I would get a number." She capped the pen. "The number today is: some of it is the compound, and some of it is an eighteen-year-old who has discovered that the only adult in the room will keep him if he behaves. I can work with both."

 

She should have stopped there. The clipboard had its page. Instead she toed off one pump, rolled the stocking, and set her bare foot on the bench beside the dish.

 

"Last trial. Contact load. Not a shower. I want him tired and I want the smell without water cutting it."

 

The sole that landed in front of him was a day's work: warm, faintly tacky, a dark print of the pump still mapped on the pad. She rolled him under the ball of the foot first, not stamping — grinding, slow, the kind of pressure that made the scale's ghost sit up in his memory. Sweat and leather and floor-dust packed his nose. Then she wedged him between the first two toes and closed them.

 

He made a noise he would not have signed. His hands, traitor, had already found the wrinkles of her sole like they knew the job.

 

"There," Veronica said, almost interested. "Fear first that time. Arousal's late. Write that down later."

 

She kept him there while she answered an email with one hand. The toes were a humid clamp. When she finally flexed and let him drop onto the tray, he came off stringy again, foot-print stamped on his chest, cock still doing the wrong math.

 

Only then did she put him away for the walk home. The Thursday-night fart that put him to sleep was almost lazy, a long bbbbrrraaaaaaap she didn't bother to comment on. He dreamed, humiliatingly, of being useful.

 

*

 

Friday she stopped pretending he had a walk-away.

 

Late lab again. The second assay was still incomplete — she would not give him Saturday's speech on a Friday — but she had enough biological material in the rack that the threat changed shape.

 

"I want you to look at this," she said, and turned the monitor. Sequences. Peaks. A lot of color that meant nothing to him and everything to her. "This is you. Copies. I can keep working without the original in the room. Do you understand what that means?"

 

Max's mouth went dry in a new way. "You don't need me."

 

"I don't need you alive in my hand to keep asking the chemistry questions." She let that sit. "I would prefer you alive in my hand. You are a better instrument than a freezer box. But if you decide that three inches and a campus full of houses is a plan, I will not chase you into a stairwell like a sitcom. I will go back to the bench. And you will find out what 'discretion' looks like when it is not mine."

 

"Hospitals—" he started.

 

"Will treat you as a curiosity or a spill." She said it without heat. "You will not get a cure from urgent care, Max. You will get a photograph and a very interested resident."

 

He stared at the screen because looking at her was worse. "So I just... stay."

 

"For now, you stay because the alternative is stupid." She picked him up, closer to her face than usual. Coffee on her breath. The Saturday-morning woman and the Friday-night one stacked in the same glasses. "Tomorrow I should have the rest of the binding data. Then we will talk about what staying is for."

 

She took him out before she used the toilet. Set him on the tank. Did not name the rule. Put him back after. The Friday night walk across the quad was all clench and no conversation.

 

He did not run. There was nowhere to run that was not a shoe.