Sweet Dreams Shrunken First Semester: (S)Mothered chapter 6 by maximally

Outside, campus was still Saturday. Weed, bass from other houses, packs of people flowing to the next badly-lit decision. Victoria walked like she had a secret in her shorts, because she did, and because the tacos were not finished with her. Every block added pressure. She could not cut one on the quad without writing her own headline. By the USD lobby her gut was a clenched fist.

 

Max, still mashed in the crack, had never been so glad to see a building. The party was over. Not Sunnyvale. The same dorm he had woken up in. First day at three inches, almost done. It could have been worse. He knew that, and he still wanted air.

 

She got the new room open, kicked the door shut, and let the whole walk go.

 

BBBBBBBFFFFRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPP

 

It hit him from an inch away, longer and louder and fouler than the stall, than the coffee table, than anything she had thrown at him since he’d been big enough to slam a bathroom door. Wet heat. Egg. The last of Bea’s platter, concentrated and personal. He got two lungfuls and understood the rest of the night was going to happen without him.

 

Black.

 

He came back wet, but not the way he’d been in the shorts. Giant hands. Bathroom sink. A towel around her. Steam still on the mirror. She had showered. Now she was rinsing him under the tap like a piece of silverware that had been through a party.

 

“Oh, good.” She smiled when his eyes opened. “I was hoping that would do the trick.”

 

“H-hey.” Hands over himself, automatic. “How long was I out?”

 

“Not too long. Fifteen minutes.” A chuckle. More water. “Probably should have taken you out before I let loose like that. Sorry, sweetie.”

 

“Maybe. Yeah.” He was too dazed — and too grateful the night had not ended in a giant hookup — to pick a fight. “It happens, I guess.”

 

“I’m glad you feel that way.” The grin sharpened. “Seems like you ended up enjoying yourself back there.”

 

He scowled. “What makes you say that?”

 

“You know.” Eyebrows. “Let’s just say all those little kisses didn’t go unnoticed.”

 

“All those—” He went red. “That wasn’t. I was just—”

 

“No need to be modest, dear.” She shut the tap. “I thought it was very sweet.”

 

“That’s not—”

 

She scooped him out of the sink and toweled him off before he finished the sentence. Only then did he feel how grimy the day had made him, and how good clean was. A morale boost he had not expected and would not admit. The last fart still lived in his nose. Everything else had improved.

 

“Now.” Back in the bedroom. Nightstand. “Where do you want to sleep tonight?”

 

“I dunno.” He scanned the room — desk, closet, the new locks, a tissue box on the dresser that looked like a mansion. “Maybe I could—”

 

She hung the towel on the bathroom door and turned around.

 

The sentence died.

 

Victoria naked was not a new concept in the abstract. He had walked in on her. She had walked in on him. The pool party swimsuit had been a preview. At three inches, with the lamp behind her, it was a landscape he did not have a map for. Heavy bare breasts that did not need a bra to make the point, dark nipples twice the size of his head, the soft of her belly, hips that had won a contest two hours ago, the dark thatch still damp from the shower, and behind all of that the ass that had been his whole evening, clean now and somehow worse for it.

 

His jaw did the thing. He did not get it back in time.

 

“See something you like, sweetie?” She stepped up to the nightstand, stooped, and shook her chest. Uncontained, the jiggle was spectacular in the way a landslide is spectacular. The girls filled his whole field of view, bounced, settled, bounced again. Warm air. Clean skin. A drop of water leaving her collarbone and taking a long time to fall. “I was thinking you might like bunking with the girls.”

 

“I—” Breast. Areola. The dark valley between. “The—”

 

“But.” A turn on the ball of her foot. The contest-winning rump, closer than the desk had ever gotten it, two clean globes with a crease that still knew his face. She wiggled it like she was offering a second menu. “I really wasn’t expecting you to come on so strong with Mama’s booty at the party. So you could go back there, too.”

 

He got enough blood into his brain to shake his head. The rest of him was still looking. “N-no. T-that’s alright.”

 

“Are you sure?” Over her shoulder, smug, the smile she used when she already knew the answer. “You know I can always tell when you’re lying, sweetie.”

 

He sighed. Favorite refrain. She used it when he was lying and she used it when he was telling the truth and just could not hold the face. He tried the face anyway. Serious. Small. Ridiculous.

 

“Look. It’s been a long day. I don’t mind if you put me back in your bra in the morning or whatever. All I really want right now is a little me-time.”

 

“You time.” She grinned and mimed it, slow, crude, unmistakable. “You mean—”

 

“What? I— no. Not like that.” Heat up his neck. “I just mean we’ve been together nonstop since this morning. Couldn’t you just, like, set me up in a tissue box or something?”

 

“And risk someone coming in and taking you while I’m asleep?” She shook her head like he had asked to sleep in traffic. “I’m not staying here for my health, sweetie. I’m here to look after you. I don’t take that responsibility lightly. Now hurry up and decide before I decide for you.”

 

He almost pointed at the two new locks on the door. Very new. Very reliable-looking. He didn’t. This was the same intersection as every one-sided argument in Sunnyvale: stubborn streak plus overprotective streak, and the exit always on her terms.

 

“Well—”

 

“Alright.” She reached down and scooped him. “Time’s up. Option two.”

 

“Wait.” He knew what option two was. The air left him in a yelp. “I changed my mind.”

 

“What did I tell you, sweetie?” She settled onto the king bed on her side, then rolled far enough onto her stomach that the cheeks opened like a door. The view from her palm was the contest again, clean, the same geography, his for the night whether he signed or not. She nestled him into the fold while he struggled, gentle and inevitable, and the door closed.

 

“You had your chance to choose, and you missed it.” He slid, without meaning to, toward the deep part — gravity and leftover damp and the slope of her doing the rest. His face fetched up against the pucker. She bit her lip at the contact, a little sound in her throat that he was going to hear later whether he wanted to. “Now. Sweet dreams, sweetie.”

 

Dark. Soft. Blubbery weight that did not care about the speech he had written on the nightstand. The gurgle of a digestive system that had not clocked out. He groaned because there was nothing else to do with the air.

 

It was going to be a very long and very smelly night. His rightful place, as far as she was concerned. He already knew she would put him back if he wriggled free. That was the whole policy.

 

The first hour was learning the new room from inside her.

 

The RA suite had a king mattress and a window he could not see. What he had was skin. Heat that did not ebb. The weight of one cheek settled over his back like a sandbag, the other a wall against his chest. Her hole, relaxed for sleep and still busy with lunch, rested on his mouth the way a hand rests on a rail. Every breath was her. Perfume from the parade, soap she had not used yet, the day’s sweat baked into the crease, taco sour in a low constant that spiked when she shifted.

 

She fell asleep fast. People who had never spent a night under her would not have believed the snoring. Unladylike. Open-mouthed. A rumble that started in her chest and came down through the guts and into his skull. Between snores, her body kept working. Small leaks at first, the kind she would have held on the quad.

 

prrrt

 

prrrrrrrt

 

Each one a warm puff against his lips. He turned his head. There was no angle that was not the job. He stole minutes. Not hours. The minutes did not chain together. He would drop toward sleep and a longer one would shove him awake with wet heat and the taste of beans that should have been done with him by now.

 

Midnight, or what he guessed was midnight: she rolled onto her back. The cheeks spread. Air that was not hers touched him for a second — room air, almost cold — and then she settled, and the canyon became a valley, and he slid, and her hand came down out of a dream and pushed him home without waking. Fingers bigger than his torso. A pat. Then the snoring resumed, louder on her back, and the leaks had more room to bloom.

 

He lay there and did the thing he had done in Sunnyvale when the purifier lost: counted. One. Two. Three. He lost the count when a real one finally built.

 

BBBrrrrrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAapppp

 

Not the door blast. Sleepy. Thick. It went on long enough that he stopped being a person and became a place the gas was passing through. When it ended he was shaking. She smacked her lips, still asleep, and muttered something that might have been his name and might have been Izzy’s.

 

He told himself that in the morning he would say it plain. Never again. Not for a second. Not as a joke. He would sit on the nightstand and use sentences. He would not kiss anything. He would ask for the tissue box while she was awake enough to hear the locks.

 

Around three she rolled hard onto her side and the cheeks opened enough to dump him onto the sheet. Real air. Real dark. The window a gray square. He lay on the cotton, slick, gasping, and for one stupid second thought about crawling for the edge of the bed and the drop to the floor and the gap under the door.

 

Half-asleep, her hand found him anyway. Palm. Fingers. A groggy noise of complaint that he had gone missing. She scooped, stuffed, clenched. After that he did not budge. Face to pucker, glued there by sweat that had cooled and then warmed again. All five senses spoken for. Sight gone. Sound the snore and the wet ticks of her gut. Smell the whole day compressed. Taste the same. Touch the pulse of a hole that twitched in her sleep like it was dreaming about the contest.

 

Time became the space between rumbles. He stopped guessing hours. He learned the difference between a shift-fart and a dream-fart and the long digestive ones that meant the tacos were still moving. He slept in scraps. Once he dreamed he was back in the old room with Zeke and the PlayStation, then the dream filled with her smell and he woke up still here.

 

Toward dawn the leaks got quieter and meaner, the leftovers of leftovers. Her breathing changed. The body around him started to wake up the way large animals wake up — a stretch that mashed him flatter, a clench that was almost affectionate, a sigh that pushed a last warm thread into his face.

 

The crack did not care what he had planned to say.

 

It held him until the dark thinned for real, and Sunday started whether he was ready or not.