“No, they were all great,” Adam said, projecting enthusiasm over the space where his heart rattled in his ribcage. He braced his feet on the city sidewalk and looked into the orange glow of the bar he’d just left. Through the windows, people flirted at a row of long tables. “I’ll find someone, eventually. I didn’t really connect with anyone there.”
“You couldn’t look up to any of them, you mean.” Adam’s friend guffawed on the phone. “You gotta quit that job, man. It’s messing with your head.”
Adam scowled. Working as a physical therapist to the Women’s Basketball Team was, most days, the only thing keeping him from jumping out of his own skin. He looked past the bar sign, up and up to the full height of the skyscraper shimmering in the late afternoon light. Let his gaze rest there until he felt calm again.
His friend spoiled it by echoing Adam’s most intrusive thought. “You’re six-six, dude, you’re not gonna find someone taller than you who’s compatible. Give it up.”
“Never should’ve told you.” Adam rested his back against the building’s cold stone, trying a more extreme angle. He caught another fleeting sense of smallness and closed his eyes, inhaling it like a wisp of smoke.
“Must’ve been some wet dream.”
“It was real.” Eyes shut, he conjured the memory that almost wrecked his life. Her presence. Her scent. Huge fingertips spreading warmth, music, emotion, rightness through him as he dwindled. Taking his size like a gift he didn’t know he could give.
He had been small, sensual, open to her in the most human of ways. He’d have called her an angel, except what kind of angel shrinks men and pushes them deep inside? A blessing, a revelation. Sweet, wet sanctuary.
She’d disappeared. When he grew back later that night to a height that taunted him, each inch seemed to tear him further away from his true self.
He opened his eyes to the dissonant world around him. Everything out of proportion. I am small, he thought. Every part of him knew this was right; the world itself was out of joint. He’d make any sacrifice to shrink that way again.
“It was real,” he repeated, trying to ground himself in the only truth left to him. I am small.
Adam’s eyes felt the strain of looking up. His gaze fell to passing traffic and one heartbeat later, his jaw fell too.
A white moving truck. A jagged hole at the top of the metal.
A hand. Fingers inside.
Huge.
“It’s real,” Adam breathed. Stared. “It’s real!” The truck paused at a stoplight less than thirty feet away. He shoved his phone in his pocket and ran right into the street. He wrapped his hand around the dusty handle at the back of the truck and hauled himself up, right as the truck rolled forward.
“What are you >i?doing?” he asked himself.
A moan reverberated inside the truck, as if in answer. Something smacked into the door he leaned against, making him jump. The truck picked up speed.
He looked up to the hole near the top of the truck, where the fingers had disappeared. He saw movement within, but nothing certain. His eyes widened as the metal at his hip shuddered, then dented outwards.
The truck hit a pothole, and Adam clung to the handle like his last salvation. He squinted, surprised. That door isn’t secure! At the next stoplight, he reached down to grab the canvas pull tab, then hauled upwards.
A resonant shriek met his ears and those same huge fingers scrambled against the door, trying to close it. Adam shouted in triumph at the sight of those fingertips, twice the size of his own. “No—I’m sorry!” cried a feminine voice. “Don’t come in here!”
“Please!” he yelled. “I can help you!” You can help me.
“No! This isn’t real. It can’t be.” You sure about that, lady?
Adam felt the truck start forward again. Fuck it.
He released his anchoring hold on the handle, ducked down, and rolled under the door as it fell. He came to his hands and knees on the battered floor. A ray of sunlight from the hole splashed down into the gloom, and an upright beam from a flashlight bounced in the corner.
A gasp, and the windy breath of large lungs. Barely daring to hope, Adam raised his eyes up. And up.
---
“This can’t be happening,” the giantess said, staring down at Adam. She looked ready to swat him, but stopped just short of taking her arm from across her breasts or her hand from between her legs. “You know what would’ve helped? Listening to me and leaving me the fuck alone—”
“It’s real,” he said, paying more attention to the music in his memory than to what she was saying. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “Like an angel. How big can you grow? Can you shrink? Just yourself, or…? Do you recognize me?”
“What? I’ve been trying to shrink myself,” she wailed. Metal groaned above her as her frustration expanded, and she curled up into a tighter ball. “I’m not an angel. I’m not a freak. Just a woman having a fucking nightmare. God, please make it stop!”
Adam stopped. He frowned. Was she an angel? Or was she more like an athlete panicking on the basketball court? “Hey. I’m here. What do you need?”
The question clearly caught her by surprise.
“Nobody’s asked me that this whole time,” she said. “A week since I got evicted—it was an accident, dammit—and two days since my own family sold me to the fae.” She grimaced.
“Is that what you are? A… fairy?” Even in the dim light he saw her roll her eyes.
“They tell me I’m a sizeshifter. They also told me that meditation and orgasm were my only options to not outgrow this truck for the next eight hours. So.”
His eyebrows flew up. “Well, I’m... at your service?”
She snorted. “I know something you can do.”
When she reached for him, he went willingly.
Between her leviathan thighs, the world felt right again. I am small.
He knelt, kissing her clit like a sacrament.
---
Adam’s body vibrated with warmth, and music, and anticipation so profound he was surely floating. He was helping a 20-ft tall angel fairy sizeshifter come to the most amazing climax! Even his cock was straining upward, reaching, hoping this would be the rescue he’d been longing for.
The moment should have been holy, but left him aching. He wasn’t floating. She hadn’t picked him up.
She was growing him.
He gasped, groaned. He had wanted the smallness so badly, he’d cleared away any resistance to the energy filling his body. But this was all wrong. “No, please, this is worse! Not bigger!”
The angel’s thighs shrank around him. The truck shifted from cavernous to confining.
His soaked clothes shredded with a pop. He hit his head on the roof of the truck, then fell to his knees between her dwindling legs. “This can’t be happening,” he moaned.
The look of relief in her eyes broke his heart.
“No fun being giant, naked, and panicking in front of a stranger, is it?” she said, and he couldn’t tell if it was revenge or empathy or both. He pulled back and attempted to cover his erection.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to take so much.” She was now roughly the same size he’d been minutes ago and eyed him ruefully. “Still think I’m so beautiful, big guy?”
Anguish rolled through him. I am small. Tears threatened in the corners of his eyes. Too overwhelmed to care about modesty, he lifted both his hands to his face to hide.
“You’re beautiful. But that’s not why—” He choked. Forced himself to breathe deeply and listen to the sound of traffic rushing outside. He still smelled her musk on his face. Still tasted her.
“I just—someone shrank me once, a long time ago. Ever since, it’s like everything is wrong. Like I’m wrong. Like I’m too—too big—” a sob escaped him and he fell forward, doubling up on his hands and knees.
What if she couldn’t shrink him back to six-foot-six? What if this was his new normal? Tears spilled onto the filthy floor, and he panted with huge, claustrophobic misery.
“Oh,” she said. Her voice was tiny in more ways than one. “That’s why you followed me. You saw—” she glanced at the hole she’d torn in the truck, then back to him. “And you thought I’d make you shrink?”
She knelt by his face, and he lifted his eyes to look up at her. A whisper of smallness from the angle, one of his favorites during sex. Soon gone.
He marveled at her doll-like beauty, now she was genuinely fairy-sized. Envy corroded his heart like acid.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about how this would feel to you. Couldn’t see past the chance to feel small again.”
“Honestly, that same hope was the only thing keeping me sane, too.” She ran a miniature hand across his wet cheek, lifted it to her mouth. Tasting his tears, and herself. He watched her, willing himself not to move. “I’m sorry, too. I just wanted to take the edge off. I shouldn’t have forced all my size on you. This is my burden.”
Adam took a steadying breath, wiped his eyes, and rolled onto his side. “Tell me this isn’t permanent, and I’ll forgive anything.”
“Not permanent. Not for you, anyway,” she said sadly.
“Then I can bear it,” he said, trying to sound brave. “Maybe even better than you can. I’ve been feeling too big for ages, now. This is… harder. But knowing it will end, I think I can bear it for you. For part of this trip, possibly even all of it. Just… take me with you. Deal?”
Her eyebrows pushed up. He held out his hand, extending his index finger as if for a handshake. “Name’s Adam.”
“Lillian,” she said, resting her hand on his fingertip. Gently, he moved it up and down.
She didn’t take her hand back, and he kept as still as the traffic would allow. “Hoping to find the one who shrank you?” she asked. Her eyes softened. “Was she beautiful?”
Adam shrugged his shoulders in the infinitesimal amount of space available to him. “I don’t even know. It was dark. Unreal. I felt more than I saw. Honestly…” He looked at her. “I know big guys aren’t supposed to want to be small. But it was the smallness itself that was beautiful.”
She smiled tenderly and watched him in the dim light, her hand still on his fingertip. “It never occurred to me that someone would want what’s happening to me,” she said.
She looked at him. “Adam, I know we just met. But if you come with me. Promise you’ll stay with me? Even if I’m not big all the time? Or… Even if I get too big to… to talk to?” Adam watched her weep and wanted to shelter her from everything she faced. Every unknown.
“I will, Lillian.” Carefully, he reached out and rested his fingertip on her shoulder. “You’re not alone.”
Was she sobbing? Laughing? “It’s real,” she whispered. Then, still crying, she beamed at him.
I am small, he thought, as a smile spread shyly across his own face. But I can be big, too.
She stretched out next to him, closer than she needed to. The sounds outside the truck hovered nearby, yet a world away. They looked at each other in the dusty light.
“I know something else you can do for me, Adam,” she said. He froze as she leaned close and pressed her small lips to the widest part of his own bottom lip.
Her kiss was small but so warm, like a gift. He held her, kissed her back.
Music. Emotion. Rightness. There in the emptiness, they made their sanctuary together.