The Whale and the Ocean
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This story is still being written, but maybe if I post it, that will sorta encourage me into finishing it? Less polished than my normal output, since I am prioritizing speed over perfection with this one.
CW: Not much. This is honestly a pretty gentle one. Accidental fearplay maybe? Crushed objects? Thalassaphobia? Just too many emotions to fit into one lonely brooding man?
Yeah you heard that right, romance fans, this guy broods, like Darcy!
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CHAPTER 1:
2006
This week was supposed to be all about relaxation, but Adam just couldn’t sleep. He turned over in bed, thinking maybe the vacation home’s unfamiliar mattress was the problem. It was plenty soft, it just wasn’t, his mattress. He found the perfect position, his heavy-textbook-back-injury from when he took AP Calc and AP Physics in the same semester in high school, four years ago now, was soothed by his spine’s perfect alignment against the downy cushion of the mattress. He had to not think about the laptop.
The reality-warping experiment was in May. He had to not think about the laptop, so instead, he thought about that day, and scratched the scar where an ARB (Alternate Reality Beam) hit him on his left hand. It stung at the time. Now, it just constantly itched. The doctor called it stress-caused eczema, and told him to simply stop scratching it.
Adam had received his academic advisor’s A+ grade from that experiment in June. It was now July 7, it was now time to rest. Adam should close his eyes again, now, and he should stop thinking about things that caused his chest to tighten.
It was the time to rest for Adam, maybe, but the department that processed admissions into the Collins Lab at Princeton, where he wanted to get his physics PhD, didn’t rest over the summer. They worked diligently through July and August to process the applications of graduating Princeton seniors like Adam.
He had told himself he’d take his laptop to the Ocean City library tomorrow to check his email. He told himself he would sleep now, and that he wouldn’t do exactly this: rip the phone cord out from the vacation home’s wall phone, shove it into a modem he had brought from home, and connect to his university email at midnight, maybe even waking up his mom, his dad, or his little sister with the modem’s unholy screeching. He wished the vacation home at least had DSL, a quieter connection, like his dorm room, but, beggars can’t be choosers.
He remembered that his mom, dad, and sister were out at a concert for his sister’s favorite band tonight, a forty minute drive away. The home was his. The Internet machine squealed, automatically dialing up a connection at 56k speed. Firefox loaded the university mail page.
“Regarding your application,”
A curt title read in his inbox, from Sasha Rye, the assistant to the head of the Collins Lab.
He swallowed hard. He felt blood rushing to his ears. He moved the trackpad over to the title and clicked the bright blue text.
The email opened.
“Dear Mr. Macy,”
Adam’s throat went dry.
“…decided to deny your admission into this program at this time…”
“What?” he said aloud, standing up.
“Why?” he added, reading the email again and again for anything like a critique of his work or his application. Nothing was explained. The lab apparently didn’t think that they owed him the courtesy of a reason, “why.” They just rejected him like it was nothing.
Like he wasn’t a legacy admission. Like his grandfather wasn’t a famous professor there in the 1960’s.
Like he was doomed to work in some stupid aerospace company making missiles, if he couldn’t get a real foothold in the cut throat world of Ivy-league physics research.Adam was fucked. He had everything going for him in this application, and he still didn’t get in. The walls started closing in. The rushing sound in his ears got louder. He put his laptop down and noticed the ceiling was suddenly close to his head. The fan thwacked him in his skull, and he staggered backwards.
Was the room collapsing? Maybe an earthquake?
He ran toward the back door, which lead directly to the small backyard and the beach beyond. The living room ceiling fell onto his head, and he closed his eyes, bracing for worse. It stopped falling, as though stopped by the – wall? Coughing out plaster dust from a hole in the ceiling his head made, he held his breath, and noticed that the ceiling hadn’t fallen. He had inexplicably shot his head through it, and was now bent forward instinctually. He was growing like in “Alice in Wonderland”. He looked at the coffee table next to him and noticed that the 12-inch-long Wired magazine was the same length as his six-inch-long hand. His boxers were painfully tight. He tore them off, and started crashing against the confines of the ceiling again.
Worried about damaging the house further, he ran out of the back door, and into the yard, at the same time that the rushing sound in his ears turned into a roar. He staggered forward, crashing through the back deck like it was made of wet cardboard, the front of his left foot becoming too wide for the 6-foot-wide sliding door right as he removed it.
He looked around him. The majestic maple tree in the backyard was covering his naked crotch. He was about as tall as the hotel several blocks away to his left. His huge feet filled his family’s backyard.
The backyard, which had a great view of the ocean. Adam didn’t know why this was happening, but he knew that he was now a danger to everyone around him, so he gingerly stepped toward the ocean. He stopped in his tracks, noticing a bonfire between him and the ocean, hearing the tinny sound of a boombox playing rock music beneath him. Adam could see the fire-lit faces of the two dozen or so doll-like people as they stared up at him in horror, and scattered to the left and right, screaming. Someone turned off the radio, and one tiny person stayed behind next to the fire, too shocked to move, before the person with the radio grabbed them by the shoulders, and lead them away.
“I’m – sorry –“ Adam stammered, before he started thinking about what his voice must sound like to the partygoers below. They seemed more interested in fleeing like a flock of birds than in conversing.
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he stared, with as much focus as he could, at the sand between him and the waves below, making sure that his walk into the people-and-house-free nothingness of the sea wouldn’t cause any unexpected casualties.
The coast seemed clear. He stepped forward. He heard a sickening crunch, and yelped as what felt like a toothpick pierced his foot. Horrified, he looked at his right foot, and saw the remnants of an empty, crumpled beach chair fall to the ground, and the bottom of an umbrella, whose top was now stuck in his foot like a sharp cocktail umbrella poking through his skin. He removed it, double checked that his footprint in the sand didn’t have a dead body in it, and continued forward to the water, step by stressful step.
The dispersed party crowd had now added some onlookers from the buildings near the shore, and gasps and screams floated up from behind Adam. Adam was burning with curiosity to see how many people had gathered, and if he knew any of them, but he was wise enough to not turn around. He figured a giant naked ass and back was less identifiable than a giant face, so to not be a freak for life, he should hide his face from the increasing crowd, which might have cameras or camcorders in it. Finally, his left foot reached the water, and he began to relax. Nobody would be swimming or fishing out here at night, he could now step more confidently towards the deeps. If he crushed some nocturnal fish in the water, he could live with that.
The sound of the waves crashing to the shore, comparatively soft as they were, still began to drown out the increasing sounds of commotion behind him. The sand was impossibly soft, and he sank in it to the middle of his ankles. For a moment he wondered if he’d sink all the way in, like quick sand, but he stayed upright. It just took lots of effort to move his foot again and again, but eventually, after a few minutes of careful effort, he was up to his waist in the water.
The waves felt interesting, they crashed against his torso like ripples in a swimming pool, but they were constant, driven by the moon’s tides, instead of by somebody doing a cannonball nearby. The constant, but tiny, motion was like a cold hot tub.
This far out, he couldn’t hear anything but the waves, and a faint sound of what may have been distant emergency sirens. The only lights he could see in front of him were those of buoys in the far distance, and a cargo ship near the horizon. He snagged his foot against something, and realized it was a buoy, whose anchor he had begun to drag. The long chain that connected it to the anchor stuck to his leg, feeling like a silver necklace chain. He wondered how much this floating light cost, and tried to put the anchor back where he thought it should go. He wondered who would arrest him for destroying this, if they could.
With how distant the sound of the town was behind him, he wanted to take a peek. He covered his face with his hands, leaving a little crack between the fingers to look through, and he turned around. The town glowed like a dainty model train set, just a little below him now that his head was half as far high to the ground as before. The boardwalk, Ferris wheel, and hotels to his right glowed like Christmas decorations, twinkling in the marine mist.
A bright light launched from the marina to his left. It was a speed boat, its little motor whining like a loud mosquito from this distance. Terrified of any interaction with a person that could lead to a shipwreck, Adam turned around, took a deep breath, and carefully placed his head under the water, managing to submerge his whole body in a sitting position.
The quiet of the water relaxed Adam instantly. Keeping one hand over his nose, he used the other to drag his body along the bottom of the ocean as fast as he could. Given the danger that his kicking legs could pose to a speedboat, he kept them submerged, knees in the ocean floor, crawling along the bottom of the ocean. Eventually he noticed he was deep enough, and out of breath enough, to float neutrally, halfway beneath the waves and the ocean floor.
Floating in the middle of the water column, Adam was surrounded by the dark, cool, endless ocean. It enveloped his naked, overgrown body so naturally, like it was where he belonged.
The ocean was the only thing more powerful than Adam’s unasked-for, destructive, strength. Knowing that it was bigger than him slowed his heart rate. He swam forward a little bit more, and to the left, further from the speedboat’s pier, and realized that he needed air. He flipped around, and faced upward, but he heard a sound in his ears again, and the water pressure above him suddenly started increasing.
He righted himself, touching the bottom of the ocean with his feet, but then noticed that the pressure was even stronger, hurting his ears, and he started kicking madly, swimming towards what he thought was the surface. A buoy light above him got closer and closer, and then further away, paradoxically, even though he knew he was faced towards the surface the whole time. His lungs began to burn, but the water pressure let up, and he started to wonder if he was going to drown in shallow near-shore water that could not have been deeper than his 10-story body. After what felt like eternity, he broached the surface, next to the glowing buoy. The one he ran into a few minutes ago was the size of a golf ball, but this one was almost too wide to wrap his arms around.
From his left, he saw a coast guard boat patrolling the area, much larger than himself. Thinking fast, he covered and uncovered the buoy’s light in a pattern, hoping to get noticed by the boat. They got the gist, and picked him up quickly. Adam was ecstatic to be the right size to sit in the chair in the cabin, and he lied about being drunk, and floating on a now-popped pool toy, to explain his naked night swim, which somehow got him a full mile from the shore. -
@tiny-ivy you had me at Darcy 🤭 I’m curious where you’ll take this!
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@miss-lillipants I read it for the first time last spring. Ashamed it took that long! I was missing out! Girl invented the dark romantic dude that we are all still writing and reading about way back in 1812!
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@tiny-ivy If you haven’t already, have a read of Jane Eyre. It’s a lot messier (for a smaller read too), but Mr Rochester is broody af.
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CHAPTER 2:
Saturday, June 21, 2025
It was the middle of the night, and Jessi Baker was making fantastic time on the Single-Handed Atlantic Cross-The-Pond Race, from Plymouth in England, all the way to Newport, Rhode Island. It was a solo sailing competition, which means she was allowed to use nothing but wind, wits, and her trusty yacht. She knew that first place was impossible, as radio chatter had Mark Halford reaching the finish line earlier today, but she was still hoping for second, third, or fourth place, since she was only at 19 days out, and had about a day left of travel left, if her calculations were right. Mark’s first place run was 18.5 days long. It wasn’t a record, but it was a good time.
It was her first ever solo race, so she tried to give herself a break if she didn’t place high. Just finishing was an accomplishment for someone soloing for the first time. It was weeks at sea alone. It was personally fulfilling like nothing else, to go so far for so long, alone, but it was also grueling.
The sky cracked with lightning, right as Jessi thought of this, like the fates had been listening to her self-satisfaction, and wanted to remind her who’s really in charge of what happens to a mortal human on a tiny white sailboat, surrounded by nothing but the elements.
The stars disappeared from the sky as a sudden stormcloud poured rain down. The waves swelled. The boat rocked every way.
A rogue wave several times taller than the rest smacked into the side of her boat, sending it reeling starboard. She feared for a capsize, but she barely evaded the edge of the water by making a hard turn, before another wave knocked her boat the other way. Righting herself back to safety, her heart pumping, she felt truly alive.
These swells were bigger than she expected based on the weather forecast. She opened her satellite phone and looked at the weather radar again. A dark orange and red squall had appeared out of nowhere, and was pushing her towards an uninhabited island to the west.
She opened her SONAR and saw the rocks of the island getting closer, even though she saw nothing but dark ocean in front of her between the lightning flashes. She tried to steer herself between the squall and the island, and noticed a small light source to her right, what looked like a small house on top of a seaside cliff. That was a nature preserve, not a light house, according to her maps, but she focused on the boat’s path ahead of her. She had to avoid hitting the rocks that surrounded it.
She found what looked like a passage out towards open water and past the squall, and steered the boat towards it. She heard a horrible scraping sound, and her hull hit a rock. Jessi ran to below deck to see the damage, and saw a sharp ridge of granite the length of her leg poking through the hull.
Her heart sank. There goes the race.
Now, race taken care of, she just had to worry about not dying in her first shipwreck. She secured her life vest, grabbed her go-bag, and tried to unlodge the boat from the rock, to see if her trusty boat could stay afloat for just long enough to get closer to the shore while protecting her from personally smashing against the sharp rocks. She managed to shove the craft off by some miracle, and it stayed buoyant for just long enough to smack spectacularly into two distinct pieces right next to a rocky beach. Jessi crawled off the back half of the boat, and scuttered, crab-like, across the slick rocks, stunned, but alive.
She was alive, but she had lost her satellite phone and radio on the boat. Only her regular cell phone was in her go-bag. As soon as she was on solid ground, she turned it on. It had no signal. She considered looking in shallow water for the satellite phone in the morning, if it could survive that long sitting in seawater.
Lightning crashed again, and the thunder rumbled, right on top of it. That squall was right on top of her.
Jessi sat down on a flat rock, just out of the waves’ reach, feeling like a beached whale. The exhaustion of the last 20 days of high-adrenaline racing, topped off with her boat being destroyed, and her being marooned, all hit her at once. She moaned in frustration, and put her head in her hands.
“Are you all right?” a male voice asked from behind her.
Jessi startled, and stood up, turning around, and trying to step backwards. Jessi had been going on 10 hours of sleep over the last 3 days due to the tricky navigation, and hadn’t eaten anything solid in 20 hours, on top of the adrenaline from almost dying, and the equilibrium mess from being in a boat for the last 20 days straight. Her sense of balance reflected all of this. She fell flat on her ass on the wet sand, legs splayed out like a newborn colt, in front of this stranger.
“Oh, my, let me help-“ the stranger said, and walked forward, reaching out his hand. Her manners took over her fear, and she accepted his help automatically, as though it was a perfectly normal thing to run into a man with a New York accent on an uninhabited island off the coast of Newfoundland. His hand was warm, and soft-skinned.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No, thank you!” the man said.
“You’re welcome? For crashing my boat?”
“Of course not! No! You crashed?” he asked, in alarm.
Jessi could only see his outline, with the cloudy sky covering the moonlight, and the only light on the island coming from behind him. But lightning flashed behind her, and for an instant, she could see a bearded man in his late thirties, wearing glasses, with wavy, dark hair going down to his wide shoulders, in a dark duster raincoat. Despite the eerie lighting and musty outfit, an honest compassion shone through his facial expression.
“Yes, it’s over there-“ she pointed behind her, and he turned the beam from his old-fashioned, large metal flashlight that way. A yellowish patch of light illuminated the two halves of her beloved “Albatross.” It was 30 foot long, and it was now a pile of firewood and fiberglass.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said automatically, but she was only now beginning to feel the rising panic attack from the brush with death occupy her mind. She hadn’t had a real anxiety attack in months, she remembered her breathing, and concentrated on what her body felt. A sore leg, a sore arm. Nothing bad. She walked forward, testing her body’s condition, stepping just past the man. She seemed okay.
“This storm won’t get better tonight. Come to my place, you can stay ‘til the morning,” he offered. “I can carry your bag,” he added, stooping down for her heavy go-bag.
This would be a strange place for a bag thief to live, she thought. She allowed the slightly embarrassing act of chivalry without a word. She got weirdly uncomfortable when men held the door for her, it always made her feel a tiny obligation that she didn’t want to owe them, but the act was always done from too polite an intention for her to ever actually bring it up with anyone.
She just wanted to be treated like an equal, instead of like a delicate flower.
“You live here? Is it a lighthouse?” she asked, as they started walking up the cliff towards what she now knew was the same out-of-place house light on a cliff that she had seen from her boat.
“No, though I’ve thought about building a mini one. That’s just my house,” he said, gesturing forward.
His voice had a smooth quality that drifted into the air like incense smoke. Her tongue-tied boyfriend back home would be extremely jealous of it. She loved her boyfriend beside his stutter but… it had been 30 days since she had seen him. He hadn’t even come to the race on launch day, which was a serious disappointment for her.
“You live with your… family?” she guessed wildly.
They had walked a few minutes through the storm, and were now a dozen feet from the seaside home’s side door. The path leading up to the door was lined with some solar-powered LED tiki lights, which cast a faint flickering glow on the man’s face as he turned around, and looked her over, top to bottom, taking her in for what seemed like the first time.
“No, it’s just me. I live alone,” he said, turning around again with a half-sigh.
He opened the door, and put her bag on a side table as soon as he entered, keeping it off the ground. She entered after him, closing the door behind her, and stomped rain off of her sailing boots, both of the people surrounded by wet puddles from outside.
“The name’s Adam Macy, by the way. It is lovely to meet you,” the island man said, half-blushing, shaking her hand.
“Jessi Baker,” she responded, shaking his hand back, smiling while swallowing her fear.
After he showed her to a guest room with an extremely comfortable king-sized bed and light-blocking curtains, they parted ways for the night. Between the exhaustion and the 1000-threadcount-sheets, she slept like a baby, in the cozy house of a complete stranger, on an island that the whole world believed to be uninhabited.
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Chapter 3
2010
Adam’s headlights lit up the dark , winding, two-lane road, surrounded by pine trees on all sides. It was steep, and the sound of crickets came through the open windows.
“You’re driving slower than my dad!” Aparna laughed from the passenger seat.
“There could be a deer around every curve! And did you not notice how fast those rednecks were going in their pickups 5 miles ago?”
“You’re a testament to that popular claim that young men don’t deserve those high car insurance rates,” Aparna replied, looking at the printed Mapquest directions. “We’re almost at the turn, that was just Pine Lane. There – Huguenot Drive.”
Aparna pointed at the street sign for the road that their vacation rental was on. Adam turned his Honda Civic towards it, and they started going up an even steeper, and narrower, route. He slowed down, and opened all the windows, and the moon roof, to fully enjoy the sound of the crickets surrounding them on all sides. Aparna stopped worrying about speed, and breathed in the smell of the pine trees.
“This is beautiful. I didn’t know the forest actually had a smell.”
“You are such a city girl,” Adam laughed. “My family used to go to the forest for camping every August when I was a kid. Boston is just so noisy. I had to get back to this quiet.”
A moth the size of a tea saucer flew into the car. Aparna shrieked, and flailed at it wildly. Adam stopped the car, put it into park, and gently wrapped his fingers around the insect’s abdomen. It continued flapping its pale green, scaled wings in a panic. They shimmered in the moonlight.
“Beautiful,” he said quietly, as he let it go out of his window. It flapped away into the forest. Adam closed all the car windows again, and continued driving.
“Maybe to you,” Aparna replied, wiping her hands on her shirt reflexively.
“Thanks for coming with me into bug country, dear, I know it’s outside of your comfort zone.”
“Those things don’t bite?”
“No. It’s a luna moth. They’re harmless, and rare.”
Aparna heard the way he talked about this disgusting creature, and felt kind of bad for her reaction to it.
“Thanks for handling that. I’ll put up with the bugs, country bumpkin, as long as you’re around to rescue me from them."
“I’m happy to be your personal bug bodyguard.”
Aparna and Adam had been in a playful, but promising, relationship for a year. They met at MIT, where they both were PhD candidates in the physics lab. They really let their hair down around each other.
That night, after a rich meal of steak and wine, Adam and his girlfriend blissfully fell asleep in their shared bed in the rental cabin.
Adam dreamt about what happened at the beach house in 2006. In this dream, his family wasn’t at the concert when the growth happened, and he had burst through the roof, crushing them all. That night had been a narrow escape from killing people by crushing them like he was a walking disaster, or maybe it was a narrow escape from being blown up by a Navy fighter jet out at sea.
Since then, he had accidentally enlarged to 12 feet once, in 2008, after his grandpa died. Nobody saw it, he just had to buy new boxers again. The itch on his hand from the laser burn had worn off in 2009, so Adam knew that it was all over now.
Adam woke up with a start. What if the fact that it happened a second time in 2008 meant it could happen again at any time? What if it happened while he was next to someone he loved? What if he got to his maximum 10 story height again? Adam was currently spooning his favorite person. He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t let a panic attack start. The panic attacks were what started the growth.
He heard the rushing in his ears. He closed his eyes against it. He could stop it, if he just tried hard enough. He told himself, “Don’t grow. Don’t panic. You’re fine. You won’t hurt Aparna, who is right next to you. You’ll protect her. There’s no safer place for her to be than in your arms.”
He felt his boxers tighten, and the mattress get shorter. He felt Aparna stir, and get smaller against his arm and chest. His hand that was under her while cuddling now held a waist half its normal size, then a quarter. He sheltered her between both of his arms and his chest, right next to his heart. The bed underneath them crumbled and groaned. Adam’s boxers were squeezing him until they tore into pieces in a rush. It was the wedgie from hell. He vowed to sleep naked for the rest of his life.
Aparna screamed.
“Stay still,” he whispered to her, through the sound of the exploding house. She obeyed.
Adam sheltered her between his two hands as she got smaller and smaller, and the cabin around them shattered in stages, becoming clouds of dust and splinters, sprinkled with glass shards. Aparna was still in his hands, but she was now small enough that Adam couldn’t feel her breathing anymore. The two of them were half buried. Adam was grateful that the rental was only one story tall. It was now even shorter than that. The sounds slowed down, and mercifully, stopped. The cabin was as destroyed as it could possibly be from this size change.
“Aparna? Hold your breath, you shouldn’t move or breathe,” he cautioned. “I’ve got you.” Adam held her close to his chest, guarding her with his bulk from the debris as much as he could, as he turned onto his back, filling it with broken glass and house splinters, and then onto his other side, before scooting forward, a few inches for him, a few dozen feet for everyone else.
He ignored the fact that most of his skin was now filled with broken glass and splinters from the house, and that his legs below his knees were now completely surrounded by the remnants of prickly pine trees, which his explosive growth had knocked over. The broken tree trunks had bruised him, and filled his legs with splinters.
The only thing that mattered was that Aparna was now in a safer place, away from most of the debris. She was staying stock-still. He feared the worst.
“Dear?” He asked, and looked down at his hands, still tucked next to his heart. He lifted the top hand away, and saw her laying in his hand. In the moonlight, she looked like a fairy laying on his mattress-sized palm. But she wasn’t moving.
“It’s safe to come out,” he whispered.
That’s what she was waiting for. She took a deep breath, and opened her eyes, before she yelped in terror. She scrambled out of his huge fleshy hand like it was red-hot.
“Thank god, you’re alive! I was so worried!”
She looked up at him, trying to recognize her boyfriend’s familiar features when none of the angles or proportions between him and her made any sense anymore.
Horror dawned on her face.
“WHAT ARE YOU?” She yelled. Still barefoot, in her plaster-covered nightgown, she ran through the lawn full of broken glass to his car, and drove it away.
The tone of her voice had told him everything. This would be the last time he ever saw her.
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Chapter 4
Sunday, June 22, 2025
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_Jessi woke up to the smell of frying bacon. She hadn’t broken her fast in what felt like a week. She stood up, and threw her one spare clean outfit on, before she practically floated on the smell lines from the sizzling bacon, and went down the house’s sunlight-filled hallway, into its slick, modern-looking kitchen.
Adam was at the stove, dancing to a 90’s rock song while cooking. His back was to the hallway, but when Jessi came in, he turned around, and met her gaze with a start, like she had just caught him slacking off at work. He was wearing a tight-fitting white tanktop that hid very little of his broad figure, which looked like the body of an old-fashioned farmer: like a man who had to do manual labor for hours every day, but who also had access to all of the food that he needed, plus a little extra.
“Hope you eat bacon and eggs,” he said, as he placed two portions of thick bacon and bright-yellow-yolked eggs onto two plates. The toaster sprung up four slices of toasted, seedy, whole-grain bread.
“I’d eat anything hot right now. I haven’t had anything but tuna fish, protein bars, and dried fruit for the past 3 weeks.” She caught herself visibly salivating.
“Your boat trip was that long?” he asked.
“I was competing in the Cross-The-Pond,” she replied.
“I’m sorry, the what?” he asked, as they dug into breakfast together. Everything tasted like heaven. This man bought that thick, quality bacon, and he knew his way around a skillet.
“The Cross-The-Pond? The annual solo yacht race from Plymouth, England to Rhode Island, USA? It’s three to four weeks long, by yourself, on the ocean. Windpower only,” she ended. She sometimes forgot that not everyone followed her sport. She tried the coffee. It was rich and dark and hot and amazing.
“Four weeks by yourself? On just a yacht? Isn’t that dangerous?” he looked at her with an expression not unlike that of a little kid speaking to a firefighter.
“Eh, it depends-” she started selling herself short, telling him the lines about GPS phones and beacons that she tells her parents and friends to keep them from worrying about her.
“Now that I think about last night, yes, solo sailing is kind of dangerous. But, I’m a bit of a thrillseeker,” she admitted.
Adam’s eyebrows raised when she said this, like he had just heard someone say something either offensive, or exciting. It was hard to tell at first.
He looked away quickly, and drank a long chug of coffee. He was feigning indifference. She had stumbled onto something that he liked to hear.
If this kind-seeming man was secretly a monster, as her true crime podcasts had warned her about, then he would have been way better at hiding his emotions than this. This man’s every spare thought seemed to seep out onto his face, like he wasn’t aware that he was in the room with someone else.
“You like that I’m a thrillseeker?” Jessi teased.
He chuckled awkwardly before responding. “I guess it reminded me of my most recent girlfriend. She was the opposite. Even moths scared her,” he said, before changing the topic to practical matters.
“Now that I know you’re okay, and fed, what do you need next?”
“I need to tell the race referees what happened to me, and get to Newfoundland. No racers will want to pick me up, so I’ll have to charter my own way. Do you have a boat?”
“Just a kayak, right now. It’s a bit dodgy to take all the way to the mainland. And the motor on my real boat is out, a mechanic is coming out with a replacement part to fix it next week.”
“Do you have a satellite phone, or any internet out here?” She asked.
“No. There’s a stationary radio, in my workshop.”
“Does anyone else nearby have satellite?”
“I’m not just the only person in this house. I’m the only person on this island,” Adam said.
“Oh,” Jessi said. The psycho detector on her mental backburner started ticking again. “Why do you live entirely by yourself?” she finally asked, unable to hide her judgement, in front of such a clearly strange person.
“I am very afraid of being around people,” he said.
“But, you said that you have had a girlfriend.”
“That was before I moved here, years ago. But, this doesn’t matter right now. You need to get on the radio,” he said, standing up. He put both of their dishes in the sink, splashed them with water to soak, and finished his coffee.
She finished her cup, and followed him, through the sun-soaked living room, with a view of the rocky shore below, through another hallway, and into a large room, filled with electronics, power tools, art supplies, and vintage technology. It looked halfway between a mad scientist’s workshop and an artist’s studio.
“I want to clarify something,” Adam said, as he turned on a stationary radio on the edge of the room, and checked that it was working.
“I don’t live here because I dislike being around people. I love people. I miss them terribly. I live here because I am afraid of what happens when I’m around other people. I’m afraid of hurting them.”
Jessi crossed her arms, and stared at him hard. She didn’t even feel it in her feet, but she was inching backwards.
“No – I didn’t try to hurt anyone – it’s. There were two terrible accidents, that I blame myself for, even though cops and doctors and shrinks, and my family, have all assured me, that I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
“Nobody was killed – thank god – just a lot of property damage, and some minor injuries. But I can’t stop blaming myself, because I don’t know how to prevent an accident again. And it could be worse, next time.”
The radio had one office chair in front of it for the operator. Adam sat down on the ground next to the chair. He looked down at the corded radio microphone in his hand as he continued speaking.
“My family has enough money to fix lots of problems. They bought this island, and hired an architect to build this house. I’ve been living here for years, now. The only person I see regularly is the fisherman who does weekly supply runs for me, captain Jacques. There have also been a few tourist sailors who have landed and said hello throughout the years.”
“Four sailors, including you.” He looked up at her, with this line. Jessi uncrossed her arms, and sat down on the wall next to him.
She couldn’t imagine that level of solitude for that long. Just three or four weeks at sea left her feeling half-crazy. The only reason she could stand it was her focus on trying to place in the race. Competition kept her going out there.
But this prolonged solitude of his - It explained his rawness. By not spending time with people, he had clearly lost his skills in the subtle arts of acting normal.
“Adam. Nobody can control accidents. That’s why they’re called accidents. It’s not your fault,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. He startled at her touch, like he had forgotten what anything other than a handshake could feel like. He moved her hand away, and smiled apologetically, while standing up. Jessi then sat in the radio chair.
“Thank you for saying that,” he said, clearly not believing it. “And sorry. I really said too much. I know I should have saved all that for a therapist,” he said. “I keep on getting distracted. Here. the radio works.” He handed the mic to her.
On the airwaves, Jessi reached the race organizers, who were relieved to hear that she was alive and well, and gave her condolences on the crash of her yacht. The organizers also said they’d contact her family to let them know what happened.
“True Crime Prevention To Do List: Let Outside World Know What Happened To Missing Woman: Completed,” Jessi thought to herself.
Adam then used the radio. His friend Captain Jacque had a weekly run to his island scheduled, with supplies on Wednesdays. As long as Jessi could wait three more days, she could hitch a ride with him back to Newfoundland. Jacque and Jessi both agreed to this.
There was one more thing that Adam had to check before he was okay with this plan: if the two of them had enough drinking water to last until then. He insisted on showing Jessi the drinking water system while he checked the levels. Expecting a big ugly tank, Jessi reluctantly agreed. What else was there to do?
They walked out of the house’s back door, and into a lush, fertile garden, with bed after bed of vegetables, a row of berry bushes, and a flock of a dozen chickens pecking in a fenced-in yard. Next to that was a wetland-looking habitat, with tanks next to it, and a series of pipes connected to the house gutters.
Adam explained that he did all of the back-breaking work of setting up and maintaining this garden and utility area, and that it allowed him to live off the land as much as one person could. He got about half of his calories from the garden, which took year-long labor, including the eggs from the chickens.
The artificial wetland served double duty as a water filter and fish farm. Most of his drinking water came from filtered rainwater. Most of his electricity came from a combination of solar panels and a wave-powered generator that he had engineered himself, all with a diesel generator backup.
This is what the mad scientist workshop surrounding the radio was for: all of the technology and modifications he needed run his own private Public Works and food farm. He admitted that he had a PhD in physics, that he didn’t really use for much, unless you counted fish farming as a physics problem.
Jessi marveled at how Adam had used his clearly brilliant mind to build an entire life around relying on other people as little as possible. Her specialty was Emergency Medicine, not engineering or physics, but she had met enough wickedly smart people to recognize genius when it was in front of her. Unapplied genius, for some bizarre reason, maybe agoraphobia, she wasn’t experienced enough in psychology to really figure it out, but she had a feeling that he was capable of so much more.
Adam checked the water levels in the tanks. The storm had added plenty. Jessi took note of how many vegetables were currently growing. She had several friends with gardens in her home neighborhood in Massachusetts, but this put them all to shame. This was professional-looking.
“This is amazing," Jessi said.”
“Those are just tomatoes,” he said, and started checking the plants for pests.
“Not the tomatoes – everything. The power, the water, the sewer. It’s all by you.”
“You know, it’s just that sustainability trend I’m following. I want to step as lightly on the world as I can.” he said. He found a large caterpillar munching on his tomato plant, and tossed it into the chicken pen.
“This is beyond eco-friendly, Adam. You created your own, little world.”
Jessi took out her phone, which, when on land, she instinctively carried in her pocket at all times, and started framing a picture of the hens crowding around the caterpillar.
“Jessi! Please, don’t take pictures,” he said, with alarm.
“What?”
“I didn’t want to get into it, because I know it makes me sound crazy. But I have an insane online stalker. I have to keep everything about my life, including my garden, and my location, off the internet, to keep me safe. All right?”
Jessi put her phone away.
“I have some watercolors in the workshop, if you want to paint the farm. Just don’t mention what the painting is of online,” he added. When she declined his offer of the painting set, he walked over to the berry bushes, and checked on them.
In the morning sunlight, with his long, dark curly hair and well-trimmed beard, surrounded by berries and flowers that he had somehow grown by himself on this salty spit of rock he called home, offering her a painting set, he reminded her of a Romantic-era painting of a gentleman.
“Who are you,” Jessi said, full of curiosity, and stepped towards him, looking up at him invitingly. He was about a foot taller than her, and something on him smelled like rosemary and black pepper. He stepped away from the berries, and towards her, before meeting her lips with his, timidly kissing her on the mouth, unsure of what she wanted. She kissed him back, harder, and dug her hands into his hair.
He wrapped his arms around her back and placed his hands on the back of her head, kissing her back deeply.
“I ache for you. Will you have me?” he panted, before lifting her up, placing her against a tree trunk, and kissing her deeply again. He then planted kisses down her neck in an orderly line. He placed his hand under her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Please, take me,” she replied, pushing him off of her and moving off of the tree, so she could take off her shirt, and her pants. She had a fit, athletic body, her skin a few shades darker than Adam’s pale color, and a dark, fluffy bush. She grabbed a condom from her pants pocket, and laid down, beginning to touch herself, as she gestured to him with a “come here” motion.
He tossed his shirt to the side, and took his pants off around his impossible-to-ignore erection. As he did this, Jessi admired how the whole of him looked from below, before he bent down towards her pussy. He sucked her cunt masterfully - apparently in his solitude, he hadn’t forgotten how to make a woman cum.
Afterwards, with his thick cock, he fucked her kindly. He fucked her passionately. She fucked him back with fervor and joy. In the remote garden he had built over his years of solitude, the pair of them fucked like it was the only thing that could possibly matter.
-
Chapter 5
Monday, June 23, 2025:
Early Morning__
__
__After a day full of lust, life story swapping, (mostly from her), being cooked for, and, at her own insistence, helping in the garden, Jessi took the most satisfying shower of her life, and fell asleep early. She woke up in Adam’s bed, right after sunrise. He was snoozing so peacefully, his body wrapped around her, but she knew she couldn’t fall back asleep. She was far too wired, from all the joy and sex and the cheating from yesterday. She decided to get up, and have a look around the rest of the island by herself.
Looking out of the living room’s wide glass window, the sandiest, softest beach of the island was on the left side of the view, while the rocky part of the shore that she crashed into was to the right. There was a short path that went from the front door with the tiki torch path, to this soft beach.
This sandy beach also had a modest boat dock, with a small motorboat, and a bright yellow two-seated ocean kayak stowed upside down, on top of the dock.
Jessi walked past the sandy beach, to the rocks, and sighed at the sight of her ruined yacht. She kept going, up a path that veered uphill and to the right, which lead to a dense forest of evergreen trees. It was a narrow path through the trees, but she found her way, and noticed how cool and peaceful it was up here, with just the sounds of birds and the distant sea shore.
The forest path veered to the left, and she noticed now that it intersected with a row of downed trees. She looked all around her as she went down the path, and realized that there were also patches of flattened ground, also in a straight line about 30 feet wide, going from the house, for hundreds of feet until the end of the path. The path came to a dead end, at a sheer rocky cliff that went straight down into open water. Jessi thought that this line of destruction looked like tornado damage, but she was puzzled, since those really never formed on coastlines. She put it in a mental list of things to ask her host about.
After touring more of the island, Jessi built an appetite for breakfast, and headed back. As she did, she saw the house from the southern side in the daylight for the first time, and noticed a prominent, modern satellite dish, behind an array of solar panels that hid it from the garden side.
“Of course he has Satellite internet,” she thought to herself.
How could a physics nerd live without the Internet? How else could he learn how to garden and farm and run solar panels all by himself? How did she not notice that glaring lie?
And if her host was lying about this. What else was he lying about? Her internal monologue did not give herself a rest. An acidic ball of shame, mistrust, and suspicion formed inside her. Anyone involved who was unlucky enough to speak to her right now was not going to walk away unscathed.
She walked into the house to confront Adam, at the same time that he entered with a wire basket of eggs from the coop. He was grinning when he first came through the garden door, as he saw her moving form in shadow, but as his eyes adjusted to the indoor light, and he took in the expression of anger on her face, the joy drained from his. He put the basket of eggs down on the living room table, next to her charging cell phone, and stood next to the back door.
“I saw the satellite dish,” she said.
“Oh.”
“You remember what you told me yesterday? Do we need to rehash that?”
“I remember.”
“So, you do have Internet here?”
“I do. But it’s not for guests,” he responded. He cleared his throat, and moved to the living room couch to sit down. “Come sit with me, let’s talk this out calmly.”
“I’m staying over here ‘til I want to move elsewhere, thank you very much,” she replied, venom in her voice. She would not let the promise of more attention from this unfairly hot man distract her from the fact that he’s also a shady-as-hell liar.
“Why isn’t your Internet for guests, Adam?”
“Once it comes in from the satellite, a hard line connects it to my computer. I don’t have a WiFi adapter.”
“You could have let me use your computer.”
He let out a short groan, and closed his eyes for several beats.
“I don’t know how to put this in a way that won’t make you angrier,” he finally said, with a carefully even tone of voice.
“Try.”
“I already told you about the online stalkers. They’re real. They’re dangerous. Only I know how to safely use the Internet here without giving them more clues about my location.”
“So you don’t trust me to use the Internet on this island?”
“I study privacy methods like it’s my job. No, I don’t trust someone I barely know with something this vital to my continued freedom and life.”
“Why are you so obsessed with secrecy? Why are you so convinced you’re the target of some insane stalker, with enough resources to track you down to this middle of nowhere island, based on an Instagram photo of a chicken?” She was holding nothing back.
“Other than me, there is one person in the world who knows the answer to that question, and the fact that she does is why my life is now this self-kept prison sentence.” His voice was raising in intensity and anger, and he heard it. He closed his eyes again, and counted to ten. He knew that getting angry never helped an attempt at a discussion. He brought his voice down to an even tone.
“I know I lied to you, but I need you to trust me, when I tell you the following: the value that that piece of information would hold for you, is not even on the same scale – it’s several degrees of magnitude less than - the value of that information staying secret holds, to me.”
The arrogance of him assuming that he knew her mind better than she did, rubbed Jessi the completely wrong way. The shine of infatuation fell off. This man is paranoid. He is conceited. He is out of touch with reality. Given the wrong stimulus, someone with a mental health condition like that could even get dangerous.
“I am sorry I lied about the Internet access. I hate lying, and I’m not good at it, as you see. Just, if you care for me at all, don’t tell anyone about me. I implore you. Forget any of this happened after you leave on Wednesday. And keep this all off the Internet.”
“Or you’ll do what?”
Jessi’s phone was sitting on the living room table, in between them. He stared at it, and hated its electronic guts. He wished that the gadget didn’t exist, wished that the Internet wasn’t so all-powerful, wished it wasn’t so toxic to his continued freedom. She saw him staring at her phone, and she snatched it up.
“Oh NO you don’t!” Jessi yelled. “This is MINE!” She lifted it up, and opened the camera. Adam shielded his face with his arms, but she snapped several photos of him cowering, of his living room, and of the kitchen next to it.
“I wasn’t going to touch your phone,” he said, voice muffled by his arms.
“Sure you weren’t,” she said, and continued taking picture after picture of the inside of his house. She grabbed all of her things in a whirlwind of activity, and put them in her go bag. She ran to the sandy beach, aiming for his kayak, taking pictures behind her as she went.
Him going after her phone was the last straw. If his delusion was all about his existence not getting out, then a predictable conclusion for it would be: kill any witnesses. She wondered if those other sailors who met him even survived their visits.
She was a strong enough kayaker, well-rested enough, and the waves were low enough, she was comfortable rowing a few miles to Newfoundland.
He ran outside, several paces behind her, and desperately shouted after her, “I’m begging you! My life is in your hands!”
He got on his knees, and held his hands in supplication to her.
She turned around, looked at him head-on, and took a zoomed-in photo of him begging, with a perfect view of his face. She then turned back, and got the kayak ready.
The thought of the face photo that Jessi snapped going onto to the Internet sent the blood rushing to Adam’s ears, more than anything else. After years of learning to process his emotions, he could deal with disappointment, rejection, or anger, he could even deal, apparently, with being close to a beautiful, intelligent, and courageous woman without fearing the worst for her. They had slept all night together in his bed, peacefully.
But he couldn’t mentally tolerate the thought of the government agencies and cryptozoology nerds that had been stalking the Jersey Shore Giant since 2006 catching up to him because of an Instagram post with a geotagged photo. He couldn’t handle the thought of becoming a caged freak in some governmental lab. The sound in his ears ramped up to a klaxon volume as his panic built.
He ran with all his strength down the beach, past Jessi and the kayak, up the sandy hill beyond, and into the half-trampled forest path, towards the southern cliff. The terrible growth would happen any second now.
Jessi didn’t like the look of his intense speed, even after she noticed he was heading towards the forest path. She got into the awkwardly long two-seater kayak, and pushed off. She looked back over her shoulder, and was relieved that she didn’t see him anywhere.
She had looked at a printed nautical map on Adam’s desk yesterday, and started rowing north, towards where she remembered as the best current to get to the mainland.
The sound of falling trees came from the south, followed by the loudest splash Jessi had ever heard. She looked behind her, and saw birds flying away from the forest.
All of the natural waves came from the east here, but after a few seconds, a freak wave came from the source of the sound, looking like a tsunami. Jessi paddled into it, and it carried her a few hundred feet north. She watched as the wave broke against the shore, going over the dock, almost capsizing the moored motorboat.
What the hell was that, she thought to herself.
-
Chapter 6
Monday, June 22, 2025
Mid-Morning
_
_
_The strange wave had radiated out, leaving Jessi’s kayak bobbing in the currents. She considered her options.
That large a wave, and that loud a sound, both coming from the southern part of the island meant that a lot of energy was just suddenly released there, and Adam could have gotten hurt. She took the Hippocratic oath that she had taken 10 years ago seriously, and she believed that inaction counted as harm. As a doctor, she was obligated to check on him.
Even if he was insane, or violent, he didn’t deserve to die from a treatable problem. She had bear-strength pepper spray in her go bag – she would pull it out if she picked up on any truly threatening vibes.
Jessi paddled south, going past the cliff that had the house on it, past the soft beach and the dangerous rocks, finally getting to the jutting-out edge of a cliff that blocked her view of the southern shore. After she turned the corner, she saw the stark, southern cliff that was at the end of the forest path, to her right, and the open ocean to the left. At the base of the cliff, a half a dozen evergreen trees lay strewn about, some upside down, some laying horizontally across the rocks. Other trees, whole and in parts, were floating in the water.
“Adam?” She cried out, before kicking into man-overboard training: look for small shapes bobbing in the water. Tree, branch, root bundle, fleshy blob, tree, wave cap. She stared closer at the fleshy blob, dozens of feet away, and started paddling towards it.
She called his name again as she paddled closer to the blob. It wasn’t a head. There were five of them in a row – like toes. On second look, they weren’t like toes, they were exactly toes: five toes in a row, each of which was roughly the size of a human torso, sticking up from the shallow water, close to the shore, their nails facing the ocean.
It must be a sculpture. She had seen realistic giant people sculptures in a modern art museum once, maybe Adam was a big fan of Ron Mueck?
“How could a sculpture crash through a forest, Jessi,” her internal monologue mocked herself. Their whole thing is that they don’t move.
Jessi got closer to the humongous toes, close enough to reach out and touch them. She wouldn’t dare. She could now see, past the trunk of a half-submerged tree, another set of giant left foot toes two dozen feet further south.
The Northern Atlantic ocean water was dark, and impossible to see through, except for when Jessi was right on top of it, and the water was shallow enough. Through the water, she could manage to see the giant right foot connected to the giant right toes next to her kayak, connected to a giant ankle 8 feet under the water. She paddled away from the shore , staring down at the yacht-length shin under her kayak, before the water got too deep and dark, and she failed to discern the expected right kneecap through the water’s murkiness.
Something deep in Jessi’s instincts screamed at her to stay perfectly still, to go home, to use the computer to call the coast guard, to hide in a hole to avoid being killed by an animal several times her size. She ignored these instincts, because she was too busy marveling at the completely unique creature she was witnessing.
This thing might be a new species. She wanted to study it, even though she knew it was risky, as it may have been responsible for Adam’s death.
The waves this far out, as she was going towards the open ocean, were getting too choppy for the kayak, so Jessi started turning back towards shore. As she did so, what sounded like a whale breaching came from her right, and she turned to watch. The giant creature’s face breached the surface, bellowing air out and then in, before it went back under water. It glanced directly up at the sky as it took a deep breath, not seeing her.
The face was fully human. The face was Adam’s. She’d recognize that beard anywhere.
Jessi pieced everything together in her head. She had been staring at this mystery creature like it was her ticket to scientific fame. She had been thinking about it as a thing. Him- thinking about him, as a thing.
No wonder he was completely paranoid. She knew for a concrete fact that “monster,” or at best “specimen,” is how the world would see him, if he was really discovered. She could guess at what the previous accidents were. She was impressed that he had managed to avoid killing anyone during those events, after she had seen the violence that he had done to the trees, apparently more than once.
She had been furious at and afraid of Adam, all for his reasonable reactions to having this unreasonable… condition. She owed him an apology.
Regardless of everyone’s emotions, it was still risky for Adam to not know that Jessi was in a kayak floating on top of his giant body, in case he suddenly moved. She picked up the pace of her paddling, heading back towards the shore.
“I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m- glurg, p’too-” she heard his pitched-down voice say from behind her, apparently catching some seawater from a wave while he had what sounded like a panic attack. Before she could react, the sea beneath her cascaded away, and Jessi ran aground for the second time in a week. This time, instead of a sharp rock, the kayak was stuck on top of a giant, hairy set of cushioned abs. She could feel the air around her heat up instantly.
“I’m extra fucked. Jessi,” he said, exasperated. Jessi turned around, just able to see his deep brown eyes from an extreme angle, before he turned his neck up again, leaving just his chin visible from her position.
“I’m going to sink down again, so you can leave. Please, go back to my house. I’ll be back soon, just like how you knew me. I float in the ocean, it calms me down, and then I get back to normal. It’s never taken more than an hour.” He took a deep breath, and sunk again, leaving her boat floating freely. Every move he made rippled the water around her kayak.
Jessi paddled back, and docked the kayak. She deleted all the photos she took that morning, and unpacked her items from the go bag. She wouldn’t be needing the pepper spray. She decided that she was going to stay in this house until Wednesday.
She weeded in the garden, and harvested some tomatoes, and then an hour had gone by. She thought about staying until longer than Wednesday. She browsed books from his shelf, then, two hours had gone by.
She was worried about Adam. It had been too long. She kayaked back to the southern cliff.
In those two hours, Adam had removed all of the downed trees from the ocean and the rocks, and stacked them in a neat pile on the forest’s edge. He had also apparently given up on the idea of floating to calm himself down. He was now leaning on his right side, supporting his head with his right arm, his back underneath the cliff. The cliff curved above him, providing some shade and shelter. The waves only covered the right side of him, from his navel down.
Jessi couldn’t help but marvel at the majesty of his entire size, laid out in her full view for the first time. He must have been ten stories tall. She scanned every inch of him that she could see, going from his feet up. All of the proportions of every part matched her memories from yesterday, but the new scale of them filled her with a feeling she hadn’t felt about a human being before: awe.
When her gaze got to his face, her ogling flipped over like a coin, to concern. It looked like he had been solidly panicking for the past two hours, and he was utterly miserable. His breaths were also too fast, for his resting posture. She sped up, and paddled closer.
Adam had been avoiding looking at her as she approached. He now directed his gaze at her and weakly waved with his left hand. Jessi didn’t feel afraid, but the eye contact from a head that enormous sent an instinctive shiver down her spine.
“I really thought you’d leave after you saw this,” he said, gesturing to his whole length.
Jessi shrugged, emphasizing it by jiggling the two-sided-paddle, and continued rowing closer. She knew it would be hard for him to hear anything she said, so she switched to big gestures.
“I’m sorry this happened near you. I tried to prevent it. And I’m sorry that I couldn’t end it. It’s never lasted this long.”
She gave a big shrug again. She was now just one his-arm-length away from him.
“Are you still going to flee this island on that kayak?” he asked.
Jessi shook her head, “no.”
“Have you taken more photos of me, where I’m like this?”
“No.”
“Are you going to post the photos you took earlier online?”
“No.”
“Do you still think I’m crazy to be this paranoid about people finding me?”
“No,” this time, shaken vigorously.
“That’s a relief,” Adam said. He visibly softened: his shoulders and his neck relaxed. He started feeling his pulse with his left hand.
Jessi waved at him, and gestured, “stop,” then pointed to herself.
“You want to take my pulse, little doctor?” he asked, half-amused.
Jessi nodded, “yes”.
His terror at what might happen if she posted those photos had lasted what felt like all day to him. That’s why he was still the size of a cruise ship. Now that he had her assurances, he was willing to let her take some control. If, as a doctor, she knew something that could end the panic attack at the core of this growth event, he would do whatever she asked.
“You’re not afraid of me?” He asked.
She shook her head, “No.”
“Hold tight, I’m grabbing the boat,” he said.
He cupped the fingers of his left hand into a loose u-shaped-claw around the kayak. He lifted it, with her in it, up and out of the waves, and held it flush against his left shoulder. The two-seated ocean kayak was 14 feet long, a little longer than his hand. Now that she was right next to it, she noticed that she was about as tall as his middle finger.
Jessi tucked the paddle between his loose grip and the boat, unstrapped herself, and clambered onto his neck. She shimmied across, brushing against the thick fibers of his beard, which smelled like minty aftershave. She felt for his massive carotid artery. It pulsed under her hand like a river of blood coursing under his warm skin. His pulse was around 130, which was very high for a fit person. She had seen these symptoms countless times in the E.R in her 10 years as a med student and resident.
Jessi moved over to his ear to speak, holding onto his earlobe for balance. When she touched the extra soft skin of this part, he visibly got goosebumps, all over his body, and breathed in suddenly. She remembered a previous boyfriend who considered his earlobes an erogenous zone.
“You’re right to be concerned Adam, your pulse is high. But it’s a normal number for a run-of-the-mill panic attack. Based on that, and your other non-supernatural symptoms, that’s all that this really is. Have you done ‘box breathing’ before?” She asked.
He replied with a rumbling, “Mmm-hmm.” The vibration from his vocal chords shook her all the way through, like she was standing on the subwoofers at a loud rock show.
“That’s great. I’m going to stay on your neck and monitor your pulse for a few minutes. All you have to do is that ‘box breathing’. Can you do that for me, Adam?” she said right into his ear.
“Yes ma’am,” he rumbled back.
She laid on top of his horizontal neck for a few minutes, checking the pulse as each minute went by. 120, 110, 100, 85. As she did so, despite the precarious position of straddling his neck, she felt totally safe on top of him. She knew he wouldn’t let her get hurt. The loud sounds of his breaths slowed down as he did the box breathing, until they blended in with the soothing sound of the waves.
“Your pulse is going down, Adam.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I can feel the panic wearing off.” From her angle, she could only tell that he was half-smiling by watching the edge of his cheeks tense.
“While I’m here,” Jessi said, speaking directly into his ear again, “I think you’re beautiful, at both sizes,” she finished, before she squeezed the edges of his earlobe in a makeshift hug. His cheeks got more tense, as his closed-lips smile widened.
Jessi got back in the boat, and he held her out in front of his face for a moment.
“Watch out, you little temptress, with compliments that huge,” he said. His big face was blushing.
He moved his hand down, letting the boat back into the water, right as his arm started getting too small to hold the weight of it. Every new breath he let out, he was smaller. He was now small enough for the 10-foot waves to cover sideways, then he was the length of the kayak, then shorter than it, and finally, he was normal.
He swam to the edge of the kayak by Jessi, and climbed up on the boat’s edge to kiss her madly, almost tipping the two of them over with the instability. He then moved to the back seat, and strapped in, finally able to relax, as she paddled herself and his naked ass on the short trip back to his home.
