Cloud Nine

Note: This story has an interactive counterpart.

It was nearly 10 PM by the time you walked in through the door. Between a late night at the office, the residual city gridlock, and a last minute need to pick up a few things before getting home, you were placing your purse down much later than you had intended.

Your hand reached up and flicked on the living room lights, casting a smooth LED glow over the modern room. The vision of the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows across from you was as breathtaking tonight as it was when you and your wife first signed for the place. The only thing that would have completely finished the scene, as a matter of fact, was Lauren, waiting for you on the couch.

It wasn’t completely unexpected that she wasn’t there. Sure, there were plenty of nights you caught her lying on the couch with her iPad, absentmindedly sketching a new design or playing around with a new layout concept. Yet, you were pretty sure you knew where to look for her when she wasn’t around. There wasn’t any dinner sitting in the open-air kitchen, nor were there delivery bags. The door to her small office was closed, which meant she probably lost track of time again.

You put the small bag of groceries and household supplies onto the kitchen counter and slipped off your high heels. It was time to go find your wife.

You knock on the door lightly at first, not wanting to scare her if she was lost in her punk playlist. It wouldn’t have been the first time you opened the door and kissed her on the neck, scaring the complete shit out of her.

A few moments pass, and you click open the door. Darkness is the only thing that greets you in return. Your face wrinkles into a frown. You passed her car in the lot on the way in, right?

If she’s not here, then there’s only one place left in the apartment that she could be.

You decide to move towards the hallway that connects the living room to the bedroom. A few steps down the hall, however, and you realize there’s the familiar glow of a laptop screen coming from the cracked door of the master suite.

You tap your finger lightly on the back of the door before sticking your head in. “Honey?” you ask quietly? A few sobs answer you in response.

Your pink haired wife is tucked in under the sheets, her oversized, multicolored, patchwork sweater drawn up around her chin. Her round, thin black glasses are stained by more than a few dried tears. Tufts of tissues, illuminated into a soft glow by the laptop screen, are scattered about her.

Her eyes finally break away from the screen. She looks up to you and her lip slightly begins to quiver.

“Hold me?” she asks.

You move to her wordlessly, sliding into bed next to her and wrapping your arms around her. You hold her as a few more tears fall from her eyes, and she wipes them away with another tissue.

“Read this,” she says to you, pointing to the screen. Your eyes scan the chat that’s open on her screen and you begin to parse the words. A few of your friends had contacted her, worried about her. The two of you had recently gotten into a close relationship with a new guy you met at the comic store -- a guy named Peter. Apparently a few of your friends had heard from another mutual acquaintance that Peter had sexually assaulted her, and stalked a few of your friend’s wives. And it wasn’t just one person saying this… it was more than a few.

You looked back at her in shock, unable to really process this information. Now you understand why she had been crying so much.

She holds you close and looks up into your eyes with her crystal green irises.

“Can… can you not be you for a little?”

“Who do you want me to be?” you ask her.

She blushes as you ask. “Can… can you be Cloud Nine? I’d like to be held by her.”

A light smile comes over your face and you run your hand through her hair. “Sure,” you say in response. “Do you want me to get the suit?” you ask.

She shakes her head. “No please. Business you is fine. I just… I want to hold you. All of you.”

Cloud Nine. Now that was a name you hadn’t been called in a long time. When you were younger, and a little bit more of a daredevil, you found that you were one of the few with an augmented genome that they called an G-Class. You were able to manipulate your body into new sizes, adjust your clothing to fit, and even lower your density to float on the wind. You donned a white bodysuit and called yourself Cloud Nine, joining the superheroic community for a time.

But times change. You grew up. Found love. Even found a job you liked, in marketing of all places. You had retired from that life. But your power never retired from you.

You close your eyes and focus, imagining the wind around you is rushing into you. You think about taking a deep breath, but you keep your lungs steady as you wrap your arms around your love. You feel it very softly at first -- a slight increase in your bustline, a subtle rounding of your stomach. Your skin feels like it’s lightly pulling taut and expanding -- a comfortable pressure filling you from within.

Lauren coos back at you, letting her hand lay flat on your slowly swelling chest.

“Do you think it’s true?” she asks as you grow next to her.

“I don’t think so many of our friends would lie…” you reply.

“No, I don’t think so either,” she says as she places her head on your shoulder, right above your swelling breasts. Your blue blouse pulls itself out of your black skirt, your bulging midriff exposed. You can feel the cold air of the apartment land inside of your belly button, and you squirm slightly. But as your stomach puffs outwards into your lap, you feel your thighs begin to squeeze together to support it.

“I think they were just worried about us… they wanted us to be safe…” you say to her. “It’s not like they know who I am, or that I’ll always protect you.”

She shakes her head, her glasses pushing up crookedly on her face as she nuzzles into your blazer. “I know, I know. They wanted to do right by us,” she says with a sigh. “I just… I can’t believe… I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I even know this guy.”

She pauses for a moment, letting the sound of your slowly popping stockings fill the room. Then she just looks up at you as you grow, her eyes haunted.

“I feel like I fucked up.”

You move away from her to stand up for a moment, your skirt falling straight down. The fastener definitely went on it. But you turn back to her, a determined look on your face as your height slowly increases.

“This isn’t on you,” you tell her. You slip the jacket off and throw it on the ground. “This isn’t on you at all, and I’m angry at him. He misrepresented his past to us when we were talking about it. We thought it was one instance of one of his exes being a shit. And now we find out from our friends that there’s more. You saw what Tauna said… that he was being forward to her, and she told him to stop and he didn’t.”

You shake your head, black hair tossing around a bit as your stomach now looms over the sheets, sticking out from beneath your blouse as it rides up on your chest. You slide back across the bed, leggings barely hanging on to your thick thighs and butt, and you move under the sheets to get as close as you can to her. You press her gently against your skin just as your belly button pops out, and she giggles.

“I never get tired of that…” she sighs in return.

Your large hand reaches out and caresses her cheek, slowly slipping her glasses off and setting them onto the nightstand. You towered over the small table as you sat there, looking down at the lamp and little Alexa puck. You looked back to her and she looked up at you, her gaze filling you as much as you were filling yourself. Perhaps it was filling you even more than you ever could.

“Baby, you are not at fault for any of this. Please don’t blame yourself. Please don’t shame yourself. Sometimes we make mistakes. We’re human. We can’t do anything else,” you say with a light laugh.

You finally realize that your blouse is now taut across your chest. You focus for a moment, shifting your bra’s structure so it pulls over your massive bosom, the cups expanding to hold your newfound form. Suddenly, a light ping rings out in the room. You feel the air slip inside the new hole in your blouse, right where a button used to be.

“Don’t want to keep the top?” she asks you. You chuckle in return, stretching your voluminous arms as you pop another button off intentionally.

“I can always sew the buttons back on,” you reply.

“You mean I’LL sew the buttons back on,” she laughs, giving your chest a light tap. “We both know you’ll forget.” It was good to hear her laugh. Sure, it was tinged with sadness, but it was a laugh. A real, honest laugh from her. You knew you were doing a good job.

She rubbed her hand across the silk of the black bra you were wearing underneath. She played a bit with the space where your breasts and stomach met, swirling her nails around in an esoteric pattern.

“You’re big enough,” she says with a laugh. “I’m coming up.”

You reach down to her, your head just below the ceiling. You keep ensuring you’re light enough to keep the bed steady, but not too light that you’d float away. You interlace your fingers with hers, and she leaps up, her thick socks tickling your stomach as the shift in your form finally pops off the remaining buttons of the blouse.

She turns around and settles in on you, resting between your exercise ball sized breasts and weather balloon-esque stomach. Your middle has pushed apart your massive legs, and you turn around, settling your back against both the pillows of the bed and the wall itself.

You were now the bed, and she was now resting on you, using your chest as a pillow. She nestled into your cleavage, lightly rubbing her feet against the smooth, warm skin of your stomach. You sighed in delight, the tension of the day just falling away from you as she nestled in.

“Talk to him tomorrow,” you say. “And let’s talk to his current girlfriend too, afterwards. We can take it from there, one step at a time, and I’ll be with you for every moment of it.”

She pushes herself up slightly, and kisses you on your lips. Your growth was finished, and she was now residing happily upon you.

“Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for caring. Thank you for being my everything.

“I love you, Miss Nine,” she says to you.

You smile. You can’t help but feel fulfilled in more ways than one.

“I love you too, my beautiful.”