“Sorry, your name was?”
“LaQuanta!”
I’d already sunk past waist-deep into the ocean of her eyes, but a high tide of giggles washed me back to solid ground.
It says something about this woman that she can wrest such tortuous figurative language from me in what’s supposed to be a straightforward account of our meeting. She said, “Suuuure, baby, doesn’t have to be all pretty and Wordsworth-y, just let me read how you remember the day!” But here I am.
Her eyes are an inescapable detail in my memory, as they are an inescapable fact of life for all who meet her. Big and usually brown. Sometimes blue. Mismatched occasionally.
They were golden-brown as I looked up at her for the first time. She was standing outside my apartment—well, stooping out of kindness—smiling down at me. Her proud explosion of hair was blocking out the sun, but the glows of her smile and skin were bright enough substitutes.
“That’s a beautiful name,” I said.
“Thanks, I agree!” she said. “My parents thought something like ‘quantum’ would be funny, I guess.”
“Because of your superhero origin story?”
She laughed again. I liked how readily those bubbled out, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I was being humored. That thought dogged me at the best of times, doubly so when the woman I was talking to was nearly twice my height and still growing.
The straps on LaQuanta’s sandals were audibly complaining of her increasing size as she shifted her weight.
“I like to think I’m a kind of superhero, soooo you’re not wrong! Maybe I’m here to save you.”
“From what?”
LaQuanta grew faster, then, as she dropped to her haunches, so that she was nearly eye-level with me. The sun-yellow yoga shorts and top she was wearing were more and more resembling the most revealing of swimsuits, and there was a lot to reveal. I would have called LaQuanta generously built (“thicc,” let’s just say it) if she’d been 5’2, but at over 10 feet tall, she resembled early man’s dream of a fertility icon stepping off a shrine.
“From dissatisfaction, from boring-ass dates, from bad sex, from wasting your fuckin’ time on ladies not named LaQuanta,” she said, smirking. One finger stroked down my chest; that one finger had the power to knock me all the way to the rear of my apartment from the front door, and we both knew it, and that shared knowledge practically sizzled in the air between us.
“W-whoa, we’re moving pretty fast,” I started to protest, but that same finger held itself to my lips. I could feel its soft skin expanding against them, turning them strangely numb.
“You remember what I had in my bio?” she purred. People must have been pointing at her by now; the complex wasn’t bustling, but even a couple dog-walkers should have been enough to raise an alarm for the woman approaching 20 feet in height crouching in front of a ground floor apartment at the end of a row. I didn’t notice. I was distracted.
“‘Don’t swipe right unless you’re looking for a wife,’” I recited from memory. “But, like…” I shifted awkwardly against the door frame, starting to sweat through my undershirt from either the afternoon’s heat or LaQuanta’s, I wasn’t sure. “Usually that’s a playful exaggeration.”
“I’m real playful,” said the Amazon, “but that wasn’t no joke. I’m ready to commit, boy, and I know you are, too.”
“For a playful girl, you sound sick of the games.”
“Yes! Pe-ri-od!” Each syllable came with a clap that vibrated dozens of windows. “You get me, obviously.”
“I think we’ve had a good start! Even if it was just a start. Like… three days of messaging.”
“How long you think chemistry takes? This beaker already exploded, you know it.”
The giant woman stood up, way up, very high up indeed, and folded her arms, revealing (I could tell by their silhouettes; the sun concealed their color) a pair of pert nipples, her breasts making a mockery of what was once a yoga top, glorious black overflowing the sunny yellow.
And didn’t I know it? I had lived more for the buzz of my phone in my pocket than for water or breath since we matched, and the buzzes had come late into the night, each of us trying to keep up the conversation until the other fell asleep. The second night’s talk took a turn that precluded much sleep for either of us, until a spontaneous video chat ended with us wiping ourselves clean in our respective bathrooms and agreeing that, yeah, maybe we should slow down, we only just started talking. But our bios had included “something casual” in the “what are you searching for?” field, as well as both short- and long-term dating.
As if it could’ve gone any other way when LaQuanta had listed her height as “6’1 (and sometimes BIGGER lol),” and I had told her I write about…
“Growing Girls was, seriously, a life-changing read,” the huge woman said, leaning one arm next to my upstairs neighbor’s window. If she did this to show off what her fitness regimen was doing for her biceps, well, good job; I could sense muscle rippling under every inch of those curves. Of course she did wink when she saw me peeping her guns, so her motivations were pretty clear.
“I mean, I read it and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy knows what makes being big and getting bigger fun and cool as fuck! I gotta meet him yes-ter-day.’ And you never met anybody like me before?”
“Pretty sure you told me there isn’t anyone else like you,” I said.
“Ha! Truuuue. But I’m saying, though, some dreams you got.”
“Thank you!” I preened in the shadow of my titaness paramour. “I mean, it’s a long piece of erotica, it’s not Crime and Punishment, but—”
“Puh-leeease, Dostoevsky could never,” said LaQuanta, waving away the namedrop like one of the pigeons trying to roost in her hair. “How much better would that book have been if it was about a Russian giant who stepped on the landlady instead, hmm? Better: What if, in The Idiot, Prince Myshkin was a giant chick with tiddies the size of the Kremlin? Boom. Masterpiece.”
Her sandals had long since disappeared under her feet, leaving me to admire the pedicure on toes the size of my head. I could feel every move she made in my ankles, my knees, the tips of my fingers. People were coming outside to look, point, and gasp. LaQuanta, hands on hips I could start a religion around, addressed them in the clarion voice of God: “Keep ya kids inside, if y’all afraid of showin’ ‘em what a lady can look like!”
The yoga outfit bade us all farewell, the barely-there strands snapping and flying into the breeze. The shorts-turned-thong fluttered down to me, and I caught it; it was steaming hot and very damp.
“Sniff it,” came a rumbling order from above. The 50-Foot Woman didn’t look to be in the mood for a rampage. She crouched again, smirking, eyes hooded. Her words went straight to my stomach. “A real deep whiff.”
I did. I made sure she could hear it. I gasped at the pungency, but more at the nakedness and honesty of her desire.
“Pick me up?” I said.
“Thought you’d never ask, baby!”
I stepped away from my apartment and into her warm, cupped hands. I kicked off my sandals, hardly believing I was trusting my safety at this height to a near-stranger.
“You’re safe, boo,” LaQuanta whispered. No trace of play there. Her great eyes penetrated mine. Her smile made the thought of the ground feather-soft. “I gotchu. No sweat.”
“You’re too sweet,” I said, only a little embarrassed at how many times I’d messaged her variations on that sentiment. “I always hoped a big lady would be nice as you.”
“What else could I be? My folks didn’t raise Godzilla.”
The face of God, it felt like, was so close to mine, where I was held above the rooftops and the people under them, a great Black face with smiling lips and sweet breath.
“I wanna kiss you,” I breathed.
“I know.”
“Am I gonna have to wait?”
LaQuanta’s mouth was already moving toward me as it mouthed “Uh-uh” and pinned me to her hands. Her pillowy lips covered my face and stayed there until I could kiss back no more and needed breath, then moved down to my stomach. And lower…
“Mmmm, that you gotta wait for,” she said, chuckling at how strained my shorts must have looked. A carpet of tongue lapped the side of my head. “But not long. Not long at all.”
“Before or after the first date?”
“Weeelll, the first date is today, sooooo…”
“Damn, girl!” I laughed and grabbed the nearest giant digit to smooch it. “What place could feed you?”
“Ugghh, I’m gonna shrink first, lil’ dummy!” She rolled her eyes and pursed her lips mockingly at me before they lunged forward for another kiss. “I can’t stay like this for super long before I need fuel, I run way more efficient at normal size. Just had to give you a show before I took you home to get my date outfit. I keep a few spare workout clothes for growin’ out of.”
“Because you can’t help it?”
“Because it’s fun!”
I was lowered gently onto the rooftop solar panel array so my girlfriend-to-be could adjust some hair that had become unruly in the wind. She had stopped growing at what had to be around 70 feet, and so many tons of radiant, ample woman attended to her grooming as naturally as if the apartment complex had appeared unnoticed in her bathroom.
(I could see the nipples more clearly now, too. They were darker than the surrounding shade of brown, and quite wide. I had to tell you this.)
“You’re gonna write me into your next size thingie, right?” she asked. Her bending over interrupted my contemplation of the soft press of her belly into the roof tiles.
“With your permission? Hell yeah.”
“C’mon, we both know you already had plans.”
I was 800 words deep into them.
“Didn’t you say you write?” I said.
“You know I did, boo.” An eyebrow lifted high on the great heart-shaped face.
“When am I gonna read that, hmm?”
“I’ll show you some tonight, after I give you the full origin story over dinner. I didn’t wanna technobabble you to death over an app, feel me? Again, though: all science writing.”
“That’s cool!”
“Maaybe I’ll try some sci-fi later, once I’ve got one paper published on the Nature of LaQuanta.”
“I don’t think one paper’s gonna cover it.”
“See? You get it.” She grew another few feet, just a few. But it brought her genitals above the roof’s edge, almost level with my face. A dark, coppery bush wafted its scent to me. I only got to enjoy it for that second, before she plucked me up as delicately as she might a rare beetle and brought me to her chest. I also enjoyed an airborne glimpse of her dance skills at work, colossal feet moving nimbly to sidestep moving vehicles and people as she stepped over the parking lot.
She held one arm under her tank-sized tits to steady me atop my hot, aromatic cradle. “Gotta keep my new boo safe this high up,” she said. “Let’s go get me redressed.”
“New boo… future boyfriend?”
“Future husband,” she corrected me. “I meant it.”
“You know,” I said, in between laughter at my swaying, sensual conveyance through town, “talk like that on a first date is usually a sign for a person to run.”
I looked up to see her eyes on me, twinkling.
“You gonna run?” LaQuanta asked.
I’ve helped proofread half a dozen papers on the Nature of LaQuanta since that day. And no, I still haven’t.