@tiny-ivy
Chapter 9
July 2025
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The next day, Jessi and Adam had another day-long conversation. They mapped out rules, scenarios, and plans for having more intense fun at more intense size differences. They looked up research on the limitations of the human body for their riskier ideas.
They read how-to’s on negotiating kink scenes when the submissive partner can’t speak. That was similar enough to the submissive partner’s body being too small for the dominant partner’s ears to hear clearly.
They came up with safe words and gestures. They practiced them. Adam had plenty of extra sounding rope lying around, unused. She even tied him up, at his request. As he struggled against his bonds, they both felt something stir in themselves that they didn’t expect, and they decided that whole path of kink was one worth revisiting later.
But their focus was on the long-awaited fun with his growth, first.
One of their biggest logistical problems was lighting. Adam was not comfortable with many of their ideas without being able to clearly see Jessi, but the fact that they had to worry about being seen from a distance meant that lighting themselves better just increased the risk of discovery too much. They were still figuring that part out.
Finally, after dinner, the sun had set. Adam was doing the dishes, and Jessi came running out of the studio room.
“Adam! I just heard on the radio. They saw you standing up as a giant last night.”
Adam stopped cleaning. He turned around. Jessi looked terrified.
“There’s chatter about a monster sighting. A U.S. Navy helicopter is coming right for this island. The Canadian coast guard is sending a boat to escort them.”
“No. You’re joking.” Adam said.
She looked gravely serious.
“That’s not funny, Jessi,” he said.
“I’m not joking,” she said flatly.
Adam felt lightheaded, and the rushing sound in his ears started again. He had no time to waste if he wanted to not hurt Jessi or wreck his carefully-built compound. Once again, he ran out to the forest path. Jessi followed behind him at an unhurried pace, carrying the big flashlight.
Adam thought that maybe he should be able to get himself down again faster again, at least, after all that practice. It was cold comfort.
Adam’s internal monologue was relentless.
What if I can’t control my growth during a panic. That’s a different variable than last night. What if it was all a waste of time. We’re both so confident in this working, but we could be propping up each others’ ignorance, out of foolish hope. Jessi’s a doctor, but she’s not a specialist in Monster Physiology.
He ran to the end of the path, past the trampled trees. He was now at the very end of the cliff. He glanced down at the choppy seas. He hadn’t been down there since that fateful day. His world spun. His mind went through all the worst-case scenarios all over again.
He stepped away from the cliff, back to the trees, and stripped naked. If his growth was slower because of the training, it could cause even worse problems if he was constrained against his clothing. He didn’t want to get strangled by his own t-shirt collar.
To keep track, he needed something for scale against his naked body. He fished his stainless-steel, credit-card-shaped multitool out of the pocket of his crumpled pants. It fit neatly in his hand.
His heart was racing. He was sweating. He was getting dizzier with each badly-timed breath. The sound in his ears kept on roaring. He thought he could feel the growth coming on.
But the multitool stayed the same size in his hand.
He watched the silver-toned shape closely. He breathed in and out for a few minutes, a lump in his throat. The trees around him stayed towering, swaying in the breeze, many feet above his head.
It didn’t shrink at all.
He was still vaguely afraid of a military helicopter coming and taking him away. But he wasn’t growing. A wave of relief washed over him.
He started laughing with abandon.
Jessi walked up behind him, shining the flashlight towards his feet.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said. He turned around. His curly hair looked unkempt. His eyes were wild in the dim light.
“But the helicopter?”
“I don’t care. Because I didn’t grow.”
Full of frantic energy from a whirling mix of impending doom and incredible relief, he idly rubbed the sharp edge of the multitool against a pine tree trunk, picking up some thick sap. He rubbed the resin between his hands, and breathed deep, enjoying the scent, wondering if it would be one of his last sensual pleasures for who knows how long.
“Did you have a panic attack?”
“A short one.”
“But you didn’t grow.”
“No. So. The government can take me.” He was grinning, like someone with nothing to lose.
“What?” Jessi asked.
“I’m sick of hiding. And the worst thing that could possibly happen can’t happen anymore.”
“You can still get trapped in a lab or a jail, Adam. Maybe forever. That’s still how they’d treat you.”
“Yeah. They could. Let them. Oh. I guess I never explained this,” he said. He started carving shallow lines into the tree trunk with the tool.
“My first goal in life was to discover new things. It had been my strongest desire, starting when I was really small. I didn’t care about superheroes or sports. My heroes were DaVinci and Newton.”
Jessi stepped closer, now a few steps away.
“Physics was the field that still had so many big, unanswered questions, so I went that way. I got into an amazing school. I was on my way towards a life of service for science. But in ‘06, that ambition was ripped away from me, thanks to my own fucking clumsiness.”
He stabbed the sharp tool into the tree trunk, and left it hanging there. He looked into Jessi’s eyes, with an intense stare.
“My only goal in life became: Just don’t kill anyone.”
Jessi sighed in sympathy. If the burning ambition for medicine that had brought her to this place in her life had been replaced with something this small, she would also have gone crazy.
“But I just learned, right now, that panic doesn’t make me grow anymore. My size really is all up to me.”
Jessi looked puzzled. Adam nodded, and used animated hand gestures as he explained.
“It’s pretty likely that being chased or trapped or sentenced would make me panic. I just panicked now at the news of the helicopter. My worst case scenario wasn’t being stuck in a lab. It was being stuck anywhere with no fast exit, and growing by accident, and crushing the whole place. Me having a panic attack in any place that I’m detained could kill hundreds of people.”
Jessi’s eyes went wide. She hadn’t thought of that possibility.
“But now! Ahahah!” Adam finally sounded like a mad scientist.
“That can’t happen! The fuckers can take me.”
He gestured upwards, through the tree limbs, like he was asking the helicopter to come pick him up.
“I am just so done with all of this.”
He grabbed his clothing from the ground, and pulled the tool from the tree. He started walking back to the house, a strange spring in his step, like he was excited to go to a military prison.
Jessi shouted after him as she followed. “Wait up. We need to talk.”
“Better get it in now. Military copters are fast.”
“There is no helicopter,” she said.
He stopped walking, and he looked at her, disappointed.
“I’m so sorry, Adam. I couldn’t think of any other way to do this.”
“That was a lie,” he said, annoyed. “I thought I heard it in your voice.”
“It was the final test,” Jessi said. “I had to choose something genuinely threatening. We found out last night that you could start and control the growth without a panic attack. But we needed to see if a genuine panic attack still caused any unintentional growth,” Jessi explained. “Panic attacks can sometimes interrupt people’s self-control.”
Adam looked away from her, and continued walking.
“It was the last unknown,” Jessi added, quietly. She followed just behind him.
He said nothing for the rest of the walk back. He would shake his head every now and then, like he was going through a conversation in his head.
“I get why you did it,” he finally said, with resignation, as he opened the front door.
“I’m just sick of being a science experiment,” he continued. He dropped his wadded clothes on the floor, and slumped onto his big, comfortable bed, belly-first.
Jessi stripped, and laid down next to him. She ran her fingers through his hair.
“I really am sorry to lie to you. I racked my brain trying to think of any other way,” she said.
Adam turned over to face her, and grabbed her hand in his.
“The stakes of me knowing the result of the test that you just ran are life and death for anyone who’s on the same city block as me. I’m not mad.”
He kissed her forehead.
“It was good experimental design. And the fact that I now know that won’t happen, is really, a huge relief,” he said. He laid down, looking up at the ceiling.
“I’m just a worn-out old man. I used to grow with a panic attack, once every couple of years. I have been doing it every night for almost two weeks now. I need a break.”
Jessi squeezed his hands.
“Do you think we could slow down, and just be with each other, and pretend like I can’t grow, for a couple of days?”
“Of course,” she said.
Both of them wondered what their blossoming relationship would be like, if he didn’t set off her odd fetish. Over the next few days, they lived like his growth didn’t exist. They took his now-repaired motorboat out to the closest tourist town each morning, and roleplayed like a normal couple on vacation.
They walked on an actual sandy beach, a rarity this far north. She shopped for cute vintage clothes. He bought himself new threads, including a pair of XXXL athletic shorts with an elastic waist, just to see if it worked at 1.5x. He started to remember what being around other people was like. They got dinner and wine at an overpriced seafood restaurant. They even saw a stupid action movie together. It was laughably bad.
It was the first time Adam had done all of this in more than a decade, and his unfrozen-caveman reactions to the post-pandemic world amused Jessi to no end. He had been paying attention to the news online, he wasn’t naïve, but he had never used a QR code to look at a restaurant menu before.
They were having a wonderful few days together, out in the sun, with the rest of humanity. It seemed like they were touring a different planet than his paranoiac survivalist eco-compound. After having this taste of what he had been missing, now that he no longer felt like a ticking time bomb, Adam started to think that he wanted to leave his private island behind.
At the end of their third day of their vacation from his strange reality, Adam checked the weather forecast on his desktop. He stood up from the desk, and walked into the hallway.
“I just realized something,” he announced excitedly.
“What?” Jessi walked out of the bathroom, after a long shower.
“Fog,” Adam said, pointing at her, like he was answering a question.
Her eyes lit up, catching his context out of thin air.
“Yes!” she said. “If it’s foggy enough, we could see each other just fine. But ships wouldn’t be able to spy on us,” she said. “It solves the lighting issue!”
Adam walked back to the computer desk, Jessi following, and pointed to the forecast for the next day.
“Dangerously foggy! Extremely low visibility! Avoid boating!” The website said in bold red letters.
“I’m ready to end my break,” Adam said, and grew himself just enough to be noticeable, “Jessi.” He growled her name.
Jessi was making herself blush from the power of the daylight plans that started running through her just-showered, yet filthy, head. She removed her towel, and got onto the bed.
“Fog,” she said again, dripping with suggestion, like the dirty word that it had now become between the two of them.
