Chapter 5
It was on the eighty-third day and I was two shelves below my crate when Dorothy opened the garage door from the outside. I let my eyes adjust to the increased daylight and was about to return to the collection of wooden dowels I had just re-discovered when I heard her voice.
I hadn’t given up hope of ever hearing it again; I just couldn’t quite believe it. I heard it all the time in my head, whenever I needed assurance or calm, so at first I thought it was just my own invocation. But then she spoke to Dorothy about the truck and my head snapped up.
Irina was standing just under the open garage door, facing Dorothy. She was wearing white sneakers, jeans, and a crew-necked shirt under a pale-red hoodie. Her hood was down, but her blonde hair was pulled up and tied behind her head. I stood there stunned for a couple of moments before I realized I was out of position.
Foolishly, I wasted another moment looking longingly at the dowels I was about to abandon. I started sprinting between the boxes toward the corner post, and I had to force myself not to go back for my spear.
As I heard Irina speaking again, I threw myself into my ascent, quite heedless if Dorothy might spot my frantic limbs swinging wide and poking through the post’s perforations. I wasn’t furtive at all when I pulled myself onto the shelf beneath the one where Irina had placed my crate months ago.
I had just started climbing between the top two shelves when I heard the unmistakable jingle of the truck keys. How stupid would it be if I survived all this time only to miss my ride when she came by. I poked my head out from behind the post and saw that Irina was still facing Dorothy, who just at that moment looked straight at me.
I froze, staring at my unwitting landlady for the last three months. I wasn’t in the direct sunlight, but I was convinced that my head must have been glaringly obvious to anyone as close to the shelves and as familiar with the garage as Dorothy was. Her eyes narrowed, and I swallowed hard.
Irina once again came to my rescue, asking Dorothy for something. The moment the older woman averted her gaze I ducked back behind the post and scampered up to the top shelf, pulling myself over on the side of the post that obscured me most.
Safely behind Ron’s tackle box, I peered out to see Dorothy turn and walk back to the front door, presumably with no further suspicions. Irina turned toward the shelves, and I stepped forward to the edge and waved my arms like a castaway on a beach.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw Irina’s gaze light upon me and she voluminously exhaled her relief. I didn’t know if her plan was to simply reach up and collect me with her hand, but I was overcome by a reluctance to abandon the outpost I had so laboriously established. Somehow I needed Irina to see the extent of my efforts.
I ran back and vaulted into the milk crate, then stuck my head and shoulders through an opening and beckoned Irina to me. She raised her eyebrows for a moment, then smiled and grasped the milk crate with both hands and lifted it off the shelf. The ride to the floor of the cab of Ron’s truck was turbulent, but nothing was going to break my grip.
I remained out of sight as Dorothy returned and handed Irina a tupperware tray containing some freshly picked strawberries, which Irina set on the passenger seat. Then the door closed and I waited with growing excitement for Irina to take the driver’s seat.
She was all business as she drove out of the garage and down a couple of blocks, then turned into someplace to park. She set the parking brake and switched off the engine, then looked down at my milk crate with the anticipation of Christmas morning.
I climbed atop my cabin and looked up at her, hands on my hips, my heart so full I thought it might burst. I will never forget Irina’s expression as she leaned down and extended her open hand toward me: the joy in her spreading smile, the triumph in her twinkling eyes, the relief in her resounding sigh.
I almost swooned when the heat from her hand suffused my body just before I was enclosed in her fingers and palm. I must have felt as cold as ice to her. I raised my arms above her fingers and rested them on the top of her fist. With just-remembered caution, Irina slowly sat back and lifted me up to hold me about four inches from her face, my head level with her chin.
“Oh, Zack,” she exclaimed, “I’m so glad to see you again! Are you alright?”
“I’m fine!” I replied. “You gave me everything I needed. I can’t thank you enough!” My words caused her to blush, a reaction I didn’t have time to savor.
“I think we’re okay now,” she said with raised eyebrows. “A lot has happened at the lab—it’s a long story. The main thing is I got another job and a new place. That’s my excuse to borrow the truck again: I’m moving!”
“Great! I’ll be happy to give you a hand with the couch.”
I did have time to savor the momentary confusion that furrowed her brow before she burst into a glorious giggle. I had forgotten what laughter sounded like.
“I can’t believe I’m actually holding you,” she said, shaking her head slightly. “I had to pretend not to know where you were for so long, I had partially convinced myself of the lie.”
“I knew you’d come back,” with more conviction than I felt.
“To be honest, Zack, I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to. The main reason I picked Dorothy’s house was that I thought you’d be able to make it on your own there if something happened to me.”
I had no reply to that. I had weeks ago accepted the possibility of living out the rest of my days in that garage, but I had kept those thoughts strictly separate from my memories of Irina, to keep hope of rescue unsullied by preparations for the worst. To hear Irina echo my own cynical calculations seemed like a sacrilege.
“Um, I think Dorothy might have actually spotted me back there,” I sheepishly admitted.
“I thought so. She looked really confused at one point, and I already knew I needed an excuse to get her out of the garage so I asked her for the strawberries. I’m sure she thinks she was just seeing things.”
“Well done! As much as I might have adapted to garage glamping, I’m still very relieved and grateful that you came back for me. It’s all good.”
Irina averted her eyes briefly, then returned to looking at me. She bit her lower lip to signal her discomfort.
“Zack, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she began, “but I don’t see a way to get you restored to your normal size, at least not for the time being. They suspended the entire line of research, then they fired everyone and shut the whole lab down. No one has any access to any of the equipment, research, or data. It was all secret proprietary research, and I don’t know anyone else who might have been working along the same lines. There’s just no one that I know of who can help us.”
This was much less of a shock to me than Irina might have been expecting. Ever since my encounter with Parvisi, my focus had been entirely on survival. The possibility of restoration was, at best, over the horizon. Now that it was all-but-certain that I would remain three-inches-tall for the rest of my life, I was curiously untroubled. One thing Irina said did intrigue me, however.
“Us?” I asked.
Irina blinked a couple of times, then slowly gave a wry smile.
“Well, yes, Zack, I’m in this too. It’s my responsibility to help you after the experiment went wrong. It was the whole team’s responsibility, but they wouldn’t listen. So I had to do something.”
“I am forever grateful that you did.” We had a nice moment as I tried to express gratitude with my tiny features while she favored me with a gentle smirk. “How long after you pulled me out of there was it before they closed the lab?” I asked, wanting to learn more about Irina’s bravery.
“A few weeks. First they halted all activity by our team and questioned us individually. They also searched my apartment then, and presumably everyone else’s. They made sure, however, to let me know I was their primary suspect.”
“Did they hurt you? In any way?”
“No, but for a while there I wasn’t sure what they were going to do. They reassigned me to pointless grunt work, and I know they searched my place at least one more time. I knew if I stayed there they wouldn’t let me work on anything interesting. One way or the other, I had to get out of there.”
“Why didn’t you just quit?”
“Then I would never know if they had stopped watching me. My only hope was to somehow outlast their suspicions, and if I quit, that would only look bad. So I had to tough it out.”
I marveled at the nerve it must have taken for Irina to return to that lab every day, knowing she was being watched and might be subjected to who knows what kind of interrogation.
“The atmosphere there was extremely tense,” she continued. “I didn’t see any other team members again, except for Dr. Singh once. It was three or four days after I took you to Dorothy’s. It was a chance meeting in a supply room; I don’t think he was looking for or expecting to see me.
“At the last team meeting before your disappearance, Dr. Singh let himself be convinced by some others to give up on trying to restore you. When I asked what was to become of you, no one said anything. Dr. Singh wouldn’t even look me in the face.
“When I saw him again that last time, he looked at me but I knew he wasn’t going to say anything for fear of being overheard. Everyone in that place was paranoid, with good reason. He kept looking at me with this haunted expression, like he had finally acknowledged that we had failed in our ethical responsibilities. I don’t think he suspected me of having taken you out of the lab, and perhaps I was just seeing what I wanted to see, but I somehow got the feeling that he thought whoever was responsible for your disappearance had done the right thing.”
I could tell that Irina thought highly of Singh and was relieved to have found a way to distinguish him from the rest of the team.
“A couple of days later, I heard a rumor that Dr. Singh had suddenly quit. I didn’t dare inquire further, but a brilliant man like that doesn’t just vanish without causing a stir.”
Vanish, or was vanished.
“Two weeks later, everybody got fired. We had already signed a bunch of non-disclosure agreements when we started there, but they made us sign a bunch more. The severance was less than thirty days’ pay, but I didn’t complain. I just wanted out of there.
“The day I got fired, I told myself I would go get you the very next day. But when I got up in the morning, my paranoia got the better of me. I couldn’t quite believe I was free of the lab. I didn’t know how much longer I needed to wait, but I knew I wasn’t ready then. I told myself, ‘If he’s held on this long, he can hold on a few more weeks.’ I’m sorry, Zack.”
Damn if the most reliable person I’d met in my whole wretched life wasn’t feeling like she had let me down.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” I said. “I could have—and I would have—held on for months.”
From the vulnerability in her eyes at that moment, you might have thought I was holding Irina in my hand rather than the other way around. Relief flooded her face and she pressed me gently to her cheek. I reached up with one hand and stroked her cheekbone.
“So what happens now?” I asked once she had brought me back under her gaze.
“Well, if you agree, you can stay with me until we can figure out something better.”
If I agreed? I don’t think I’d ever had to make an easier decision.
“Sounds great to me!” I shouted with undisguised enthusiasm. Irina’s face lit up with a divine smile, and she set me down in Ron’s old cup-holder.
“Let’s go see our new home!” she gushed with a shiver of excitement.
Irina’s new apartment was still mostly empty, just a few boxes, not even a mattress on the floor. She started to show me around, but it quickly became obvious that I would need to see her furniture in place before I could really appreciate it. The only elevated surfaces were the kitchen counters, so she set me down there.
At my insistence, she had brought my crate in from the truck. With anticipatory pride I asked her to bring my cabin up to the counter. She opened the lid with equal measures of respect and delight.
“This is so clever!” she exclaimed, peering at one of my utensils pinched between her fingertips. She beamed at my stores of food and water, and I was unembarrassed when she identified my bedpans. When I explained why I had covered the lid with a patch of screen, her eyes went wide with horror.
“Did you really see a spider?” she asked with alarm. “Omigod, I never even thought about that. I never would have left you there, I’m so sorry.”
“Nowhere’s 100% safe at my size,” I reassured her. “It was a necessary risk.”
“I just had so little time to plan,” she fretted, looking distantly at the empty kitchen and shaking her head. “They were going to terminate the experiment, and I wasn’t even sure you were still in that cupboard. It was the best I could think of.”
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound authoritative. “I was fine. I’m used to dangerous situations, remember?”
Irina looked back down at me and let out a deep exhale.
“You did your best,” I continued, “under absurd circumstances, and it was more than enough.” That earned me a small but genuine smile.
Irina had to get on with moving in. She was having “Kate from the gym” help with the furniture, so I had to stay out of sight. Irina agreed that putting my cabin in one of the remote kitchen cabinets would make for a good hiding place, but not before she took a flashlight and made sure no spiders were in residence.
I never saw Kate, and I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her voice based on what few muffled fragments I heard while sitting in the familiar gloam of the unlit cabinet. They made two deliveries of Irina’s furniture before calling it a day.
Irina took Kate home and returned Ron’s truck, then got some takeout shawarma for dinner. The smell of the food lingered on her hands as she carried me over to the dining table, still in a temporary location. I fell ravenously upon the tiny serving Irina apportioned for me; I don’t think I’d ever gone that long without hot food.
I was too busy stuffing myself at first, but as the hot beef and onion settled in my stomach, I looked up to take in the sight of Irina taking bites as big as my whole body, grinding them between her powerful jaws and swallowing them audibly. I tried not to stare, but I had to admire her appetite.
When we had both reached that first pause for digestion, I asked Irina about her new job.
“It’s at a research hospital near here. I’m doing some pretty tedious lab work now, but it’s in my field and I like the people so far. Once I get a grasp on the protocols, I can try to get into QC, which will hopefully lead to some networking opportunities.”
“They didn’t have a problem with your last employer?”
“Apparently not. I think the job market has tightened up enough that they were just happy to get someone qualified. And the compensation package they were offering wasn’t great.”
“I’m sorry you had to take a pay cut.”
“If it helps launder my resume, I’m fine with it,” she said with a shrug. “Also, Dr. Singh used to serve on the board there. I have this silly hope that I might run into him again one day.”
“Hope is never silly,” I replied. She smiled at that, but the flash in her eyes was totally new to me.
It took us a while to finish eating. We amused ourselves by trying to calculate how much I had eaten proportionate to my normal size. Irina was impressed, but I suspect I would have hit the wall earlier if I had had much more of the pita bread. Carbs have always been my downfall.
Irina got up from the table and went to the kitchen to retrieve Dorothy’s tray of strawberries. Each of them was as big as a beach ball to me, but of course much heavier. I picked one up and lifted it toward Irina, who happily plucked it from my grasp. I hefted another.
“To Dorothy,” I said, then buried my face in the rough fruit to take a bite. My tiny teeth were barely strong enough to break the skin, and I had to burrow a bit to get at the sweet flesh. By the time I had put the strawberry down with a minuscule dent in one side, my face and hair were stained red.
Irina leaned down to snicker at my appearance. “Zack, when would you say was the last time you had a hot bath?”
I sniffed one of my armpits, then looked back up at her with a nonplussed if sticky face. “You think I need one?”
She raised her eyebrows at my smart-assery and stood up from her dining chair. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and walked to the bathroom.
Surrounded by takeout containers, I wondered if I should stand up to see what was going on. Then I wondered if I could.
I leaned back against one of the cartons and rested my hands reflectively on my full belly. It was somewhat reminiscent of my first day of leave after a long forward deployment. On my first tour I’d rush through the amenities as soon as I got to a friendly city. By the end I had learned to slowly savor each luxury in turn.
I absently listened to Irina filling the bathtub with water, teasing myself with memories of previous rapturous immersions. It was only after she shut off the tap and I could hear the total volume of water in the echoes off the bathroom tile that I remembered that a bathtub might be too large for me.
Irina returned and placed an open hand on the table.
“Ready?”
“Am I taking a bath or a swim?”
“I just wanted to determine the speed and capacity of my new water heater,” she said, wrapping her fingers around me. “I think you can take care of yourself.”
I digested that comment in silence as Irina carried me into the bathroom and set me on the ledge of the bathtub at the corner near the faucet. She had excavated a couple of bottles of soap or shampoo or something from the moving boxes, and I spotted a pink washcloth that I suspected had been the replacement for the one in my cabin. Sadly, there was no rubber duck I could mount when I got tired of swimming.
Without a word, Irina stepped back out of the bathroom. For a few moments I just stood there, contemplating the traces of foam on the surface of the bathwater. Do I just dive in? What about my loincloth? It needed washing as much as my body did. To hell with modesty. I pulled it free from my waist and let it fall to the ledge.
I heard a sharp knock on the bathroom door and I turned around. Nothing in my fevered, traumatized, or dazzled imagination could have prepared me for the sight of Irina standing in the doorway, wearing nothing but an effulgent smile. She kept her confident eyes on me as she advanced toward the tub.
Curiously, she held one hand covering her groin, but her other arm swung free for her otherwise immodest march. Her blonde hair fell freely and danced about her shoulders. I had already made the close acquaintance of one of her breasts, but now I got a full view as they swayed toward me. I suppose most any woman’s breast would dwarf me now, but I was staggered to think that I had been pinned by just one of those boobs for the better part of two hours.
I craned my neck back to take her all in. I didn’t know if she could tell at that distance, but I did my best not to let my gaze wander too far from her face, at least until she reached the side of the tub and her wide hip obscured her face as she lifted one mighty thigh into the water.
The fiberglass tub transmitted the tremors to my feet as Irina’s titanic legs touched the bottom. She deftly kept her groin covered with her hand even as she lowered her torso into the tub. The bathwater displaced by her voluminous derrière rushed up, enveloping me in a cloud of steam.
When my vision had cleared, Irina had settled her massive frame along the whole length of the tub. Her arms were resting on each ledge and her legs were entirely submerged. The water came up to just above her navel, and she fixed me with a casual stare.
“I hope you don’t mind if I join you,” she said drily. I shook my head vacantly, and she smiled her acknowledgement.
Is this really happening? I mean, of course I’d had sexual thoughts about Irina, but it was ridiculous to suppose she reciprocated those feelings, right? And yet there she was, topless and wet, letting me look and expecting me to jump in with her.
Fuck it.
I walked along the short ledge until I was directly underneath the faucet, then I turned to face Irina straight on. She kept her expectant eyes on me for a few more moments, then dunked the washcloth in the water and started to slowly wash her upper arms.
I dove in. The heat of the water tempted me to relax and enjoy the immersion, but I needed to discover what Irina’s intentions were. I started swimming between her legs, conscious of her bent knees on either side of me just below the surface. My strokes churned the water and I was concentrating on staying on course, but I still found myself having to avert my eyes from the underwater portion of Irina’s body.
When I thought I had approached close enough, I let my legs sink and my arms drift out to my sides. I started treading water and leaned back to look up at Irina. Her face was both familiar and not; she maintained her expression of doting concern, but flickers of excitement tugged at her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth. She seemed to be breathing heavily, but my impression was probably influenced by the corresponding motion of her breasts hanging over me and framing our mutual gaze.
She had finished washing her arms, both of which were half-submerged. Why doesn’t she say something? As heavenly as the view was, I felt completely out of my depth. I was just about to speak when a soft bed of moss rose beneath me and lifted me entirely out of the water.
Irina had brought her washcloth-covered hand underneath me, and she enclosed me in the warm fabric as she lifted me closer to her face. A delicate concentration came over her expression and she began to gently rub the cloth over my body, starting with my face and hair where there was the most strawberry juice. She proceeded to work her fingers over every surface and into every hollow of my body. Her expression didn’t lose any of its diligence when her fingertips encountered my unabashed hard-on.
I managed to catch her eye and I found my voice. “Irina, what are we doing here?”
She blinked, then broke into an adorable, almost embarrassed grin. “I don’t know, Zack. Continuing the experiment, I guess.”
What a hopeful way of putting it.
“Well, I might not be trained as a scientist, but I think I can come up with a couple of new protocols.”
She must have been somehow surprised by my ready enthusiasm, because her eyes popped and she gasped. With a mischievous smirk, she inverted her hand and I plummeted into the bathwater.
In addition to the kinetic plunge, a disorienting turbulence told me that Irina was shifting her position in the bathtub. I swam upward, trying to avoid her colossal body. When I resurfaced, I found that I had turned around to face the faucet. Irina’s bent knees were now above the water, her sheer thighs rising like cliffs on either side of the tub.
I twirled in place to see each of her elbows resting on the ledge of the tub, her hands dangling into the water. Her head was much lower, the surface of the water just below her chin. Her face always drew me in, and this almost-level perspective was irresistible. I started swimming toward it.
I had closed about half the distance when her smirk blossomed into a grin and her head started to rise. Once again my progress was arrested by an object emerging beneath me, but this object was slicker and much less flat than her washcloth-covered hand. Without ceremony I found myself prostrate on the upper slope of Irina’s left breast, looking up into her satisfied face.
Despite my ridiculous circumstance—or perhaps because of it—my last inhibitions fell away.
“Irina,” I said, pushing myself up on her slippery skin, “I feel like I have spent my whole life waiting for you.”
I felt her pulse accelerate and I was elevated when she took a deep breath. Somehow her eyes became even more tender, and her smile went from triumph to wonder.
She carefully moved her right hand toward me, but her boob still swayed enough to start me sliding toward the water. She noticed immediately and her hand darted across to catch me. I clung urgently to her fingers as they curled around me and lifted me to her face.
Irina’s pliant lips came together and covered my entire face as I received the biggest and wettest kiss of my life. Her tongue did not participate on that occasion, but I had no doubt there would be others.
“Zack,” she said, pulling me away from her enticing mouth far enough that I could take in her whole face again. “I know we’ve just been making the best of a weird situation, but I keep thinking it just fits, you know?”
I could only nod in reply.
“When I saw you again on that shelf in the garage,” she continued, “I was relieved, of course, but I was also excited, like I had something to look forward to.”
“Me too,” I said reflexively. “Something beyond just survival.”
Irina gave me a look then, each of her blue eyes as big as my head but also impossibly deep, as if she had opened a window into every moment she had ever thought about me. It was simultaneously both humbling and aggrandizing to be the subject of such regard by so immense and benevolent a person.
With her familiar kind smile, Irina sat up a bit and lowered me back to her breast, with me still facing her and each of my legs on either side of her nipple, as secure a perch as I could hope for. I spread my arms wide and embraced her tit, pressing the side of my face into her glistening skin.
A low drone started in Irina’s throat and resonated through her breast, rising in pitch to form a simple melody. Her lips parted to emit sounds that I could not parse, and I couldn’t tell if they were words from her native language or just inarticulate fragments. Nevertheless, I knew in my heart exactly what she was saying.
It was a promise of peace.
El Amante Menguante 