Author’s Preface: This is my seductive little sleeper that has become a cult-classic at Eka’s. I subvert young-adult fiction by indulgently focusing on size-kink, sex, and vore.

This is a “toxic romance” elevated; exacerbated.

This is a slow-burn psychological piece that dives deep, exploring what happens when a young intrepid heroine tries to out-wit, out-last, out-sex her dark, devilish boyfriend.

This is the nasty, uncuddly side of M/F. This is a tour de force into supernatural maledom vore.

Read with great discretion.

That being said,
to Daddy’s Dollhouse, I present an exclusive edit.

This is my small thank-you for providing safe harbor for a vorista like me.

This is the version it was always meant to be.

Part I

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Chapter 1

Tease

The Beginning

Her hands moved over her body.
It felt foreign to her, somehow. But she had not the luxury to explore this further, because a sudden urgency filled her belly; a tip-of-the-tongue feeling that she should remember something, and it was urgent that she do so because somewhere, somehow, along the way she had lost the preceding event.

It was all a blur.

First: She had been in the living room; her man between her knees.
Then: She was… – she was what?
And: Now, she was here. How?

All of it was worrisome because how much time had transpired since her lapse in memory?
How could the middle narrative, the transitional piece have fallen out?

Moving with delicate purpose, she sat upright, hoping that her change in stature would clear her head.

And a sudden, wild vertigo clutched her.

The environment that she knew: the soft silk pillows; the oak night stand; the decadent bed, she knew them, and she knew them well…

But.

She blinked her eyes, straining against the darkness.

A feeling of wrongness slid over her skin.

It was the room.

It was impossibly large. It was…

I’m high. I gotta be.

Trembling, she touched the quilt. It felt real, it felt painfully real. She could feel every wrinkle, every fold. Her fingertips knew it, knew it well.
But the bed: its dimensions so distorted by this lens of scale, seemed to stretch out before her into infinity.

How?

And there was a shadow sliding across the wall; but it undulated, as though across an uneven surface.

But there was, she realized, a dimensionality to it. It was not flat; it had… it…

Her neck whiplashed in alarm.

It was a man. No; an abstraction of a man.

Because he was far too large.

And on his approach, the shadows melted away, creating the haunting specter of something materializing.

Is it you?

She looked to his countenance, hoping to re-create his face in her mind. But it was a difficult task. It was like standing directly before a cathedral back-lit by an aggressive sun. She could not hope to see its windows without first looking away from its ornate doors. And to look at its doors, would mean she would need to look away from its windows. And he was just as majestic and just as imposing for he was just a collection of parts that she could never hope to contain in her universe in one steady singular gaze.

She had to look at him feature, by feature.

His eyes: they were a vast diorama of fractal colors; blues and greens layered upon one another over and over until infinity. And in them, she saw herself. She was an inducement of color, of womanly shape and form, that was stunningly nude. And entirely too small.

In a contraction of sound, of movement, the air parting, the air-sighing, he joined her.
She felt him almost-tangibly, as an emanation of heat. He felt like the quiver of inevitability; something that would start panting in the dark.

And there was, she realized, something moving.

Startled, she looked down to see a segmentation of shapes. She stared at those shapes dumbly, thickly, and suddenly realized that the cylindrical objects cleaving through the fabric, creating large furrows in their wake, were his fingers.

They slid up to fence her body in. And she knew them as a band of darkness. But there was an intrusion slipping between the openings of his fingers; a shadow-figment that was long, tapered, and suddenly broadcasted to her in arresting clarity.

It was his tongue. Nearly the length of her.

And through the cage of his fingers, he licked her.

She screamed.

It was a malleable heat, a devastating undulation of damp warmth.

Oh my God.

She struck a hand up to deflect, but his tongue dipped into her soft skin.
And her body trembled in the sheath of his moan.

Heather

Heather went bolt upright.

She caught the nightstand with a jerk of her arms. An optimist’s inch kept her from hurtling over the edge.

But the concussive force bounced the glass of water off and it shattered on the hardwood floor. She looked down at it, miserable. It had been a nightly fixture, standing in a place of utility at her bedside. Sipping from it at night served to dampen the anxiety in her throat; but also sent her careening for the bathroom at the most inopportune times.

She grabbed her phone. The brightness of it branded her eyes, but she persisted. I’m ok. I’m ok. I’m all right. My name is Heather. I’m alive. It’s 3:45 AM. I’m alive. It’s been –

She turned her head, and her gaze swiveled to look at the calendar hanging from its barbaric nail, on the opposite wall – And it’s been three hundred and sixty three days since I got away and I have to pee.

She slid out of bed and tip-toed weakly around the shattered glass. She felt just as broken, just as naked, gleaming in the dark in a million little pieces.

For the moment she just wanted to wash her face – simple pleasures – and return to sleep.

Flipping on the light, averting her reflection, she twisted the tap handle with a violent toss of her hand. The water gushed to life.

It was as though the noise itself had the power to drive away her demons. She collected the icy water until it streamed from her fingers. Without hesitation she splashed her face, sending goose-bumps down her spine. The feeling was raw, bracing.

Once.

Twice.

Three seemed to be a safe number. With a snap-quick movement of her wrist she tugged a hand-towel free and dried her hands in vicious, rapid circles.

Heather flicked the television on. Her eyes darted down. Good, the volume was sitting at a multiple of five. On her return trip to the bedroom, she skirted the dark-colored tiles, skipped over the crack in the molding, and swept inside her bedroom.

But, curious, she turned slowly. And confronted herself.

In the mirror, she looked.
Her large, wide eyes – heavily-lashed - were still an arresting green, but they were the green of something venomous. There was an anger there, pinched around her mouth, a look of wounding; the look of a woman made weapon, a weapon hardened against the whetstone of dark trauma. And she weaponized her darkness. Her purple-black fingernails stood out against her white face as she cupped her own cheek in an expression of exhaustive scorn.

Look at you. The fuck’s wrong with you? Still jumping at shadows.

Her brazenness was as bright as the light striking off her nose-ring; the stud glimmering against a backdrop of raven-black hair.

She was striking and beautiful only as something feral could be beautiful; not of the high class or high gloss of a sophisticate. Heather had the aura of a slutty woman with high-arched eyebrows framing an unaffected, cool stare that broadcast she was ever the sex object, but so many unworthy of her attention. And despite jumping at shadows, and missing precious hours of sleep, she was still lean and athletic, with a shape enveloped by muscular legs, and a vanishingly-small waist.

For three-hundred and sixty-three days she had dedicated the temple of her body to survival.

Heather drifted back to her bed, feeling weak, feeling small. With a world-weary sigh she slumped down onto the covers; the frame creaked under her weight.

Sightless, she stared up at the ceiling, going over the dream again and again. It was different in some way each time.

His mouth was a topic of great debate in her subconscious. Did he actually put her in there? She couldn’t quite remember. Or had he been intent on cupping her in his hands, and set out to crumple her like wet paper?

Try as she might, she couldn’t summon the memory; it was like pursuing the fickle light of a firefly, the more she pursued it, the more it danced from her finger tips. How had she escaped? Her stomach churned in anxiety. All she remembered… all she knew was that she had been tiny – and then, she wasn’t. And the moment she was free, she had sprinted down the rain-soaked streets, plunging into the unkind scrape of mother nature.

Desperate, she tried to gather her thoughts. But like most nights – as tonight – she could never find a moment of peace. That luxury had been stolen from her. Taken by something unholy.

Heather would never forget.

And she was hoping vainly, hoping desperately that he had forgotten about her. What was she to him after all? Surely he would forget her, surely he would move on to the next, and the next, and the next after that. To think that she could put a dent in his daily, racing thoughts… she could scoff.

But.

Her eyelids clicked audibly in the dark, blinking back vicious tears.

How could he? How could he forget her? When –

I’m the one that got away, her mind whispered, self-aware.

Dear Lord

I can’t believe I overlooked this forum, somehow?
I’m a regular on Eka’s – despite being in the minority, there. (Or at least, that’s how it can feel sometimes )

I have a little bit of a legacy-history behind me, with about a 400k+ following and a long, meandering Anthology that’s been going on for 9 years, now (IwillfinishitonedayIsweartogod). I do have incredibly M/F focused work. Hence why I am here lol.

I am excited to talk with like-minded people, and maybe share my content.

My latest project is “Swallow me Like Your Little Pill,” which is a stand-alone serial-erotica that I like to say is: Young-Adult, but elevated; exacerbated. (What it would really be like if an intrepid female-hero tried to tame a ‘dark, devilish boyfriend.’)

It’s my (frustrated) love-note to the toxic-romance genre; diving into the dark psyche of abusive relationships, and vore; exploring it from the less-sanitized approach we often see in the mainstream. It’s unapologetic and walks the knife’s edge of being very realistic.

So, hi :3 Here I am ~
Despite my content existing on another website, would any of you be interested in reading it from this forum? Or just usher you to the other website? Or maybe I can provide a more exclusive version here?

I know how frustrating it can be to find M/F material out there - let alone find a website dedicated to it (?!) - and I’d be happy to share my writing to people that have similar interests!

Scouring DeviantArt, Eka for hooouuuurs and just not finding a proliferation of M/F content blows So if I can contribute to this space, which is so overlooked, I’d be happy to do so!

Author’s Note

Dear intrepid reader,
This part is coming to a close. We are approaching the climax. It will be told in parts because there is much to cover. I hope to have the first part done and posted before next week. I go out of town next week, and would like to leave you with a little parting gift.

Their reunion has become inevitable.

Stay tasty.

Chapter 7

Awakening

Interlude

Heather

Heather dreamed. The pill softened her; opened her.

She was – orange and yellow leaves rained down from the sky like embers of flame –

there.

Pine needles crinkled underfoot. Bark prickled her skin. The sun basked her face. Moving in a tight circle, she took in her surroundings. She was in the woods. The woods that ran lushly up against his house; the one she had finally visited during the coalescent stage of their courtship.

Heather smiled a phantom smile in the dream.

They had moved through the wilderness together, traveling the verdant foot-paths and rolling hills like studied survivalists. She could remember it so sweetly.

She: was clearly in her element, moving with practiced finesse.

He: was giving sidelong glances at the low-hanging branches - the ones she had navigated with nimble ease - as though they were conspiring to attack.

“Come on, Brooklyn, I’ll protect you from the tree, I promise.”

And - in the dream - he had rolled his eyes, but it was a good natured gesture.

It was – and Heather felt a phantom thought coalesce with her phantom smile – autumn in her memory. The vibrant, blooming universe of autumn. It had been the first time he had led her out into the cool fall air with a sporting look after a respectable docket of dates.

Back then their affection had been fire; passionate and wild.

The more they had tried to tamp down the flames – the stronger they had fanned the inferno. Eventually the flush of heat had swept over them, consuming them.

Immolating reason. And decency.

Heather could almost remember it. When first the smallest of sins had been singed away, at the time, she had dismissed it as nothing more than an incidental gnat. But, then, a larger one materialized. And, then, a larger one yet. Because after the first few dozen, it had become easy; and then easier. And so she permitted his transgressions. The promises - and the apologies - had come quick after all, and Heather had inured herself to them.

Had she been an older woman, a wiser woman, she might have left the scene. But, he had the guile of an inner city savant, with ten extra years to charm, so Heather could not resist him. Besotted and entranced, she remained.

He lead; she followed.
And with him, she knew she had been tottering on an elaborate construction of half-truths and half-lies because he had done things, and she had seen things that were - as apt as it was to say - unusual. Things that were not manifestly strange, exactly, and maybe of little note – except that, sometimes, for reasons she did not yet understand, his behavior had often startled the small, meadowed instinct languishing inside of her.

She knew it was not just the thrill of their erotic undercurrent either, because there were times he moved a little too fast, or he tread a little too light, or he had a naked facial expression too congruent with one of her private thoughts for it to have been naked coincidence. But, still, she remained.

Sometimes, even, there was a hum, or a crackle along the lights when he walked by. His presence could make a room tremble. How could she not remain?

And he didn’t eat.

That knowledge, coupled with the way he looked at her sometimes, seemed - at first - to be two completely unelated thoughts. But, then, one evening -

During one of their domestic disputes, he had characterized it, bringing it to a head with a calculably-timed I’d eat you alive, little girl, don’t even try.

And, that metaphor, if uttered by a lesser man, would have had the unintended consequence of possessing a strange, awkward delivery; but because he had said it, Heather had immediately stopped. She did not volley through with the hand-slap she had been preparing.

And to her chagrin,
He had begun using it as the great equalizer whenever she had begun challenging his boundaries, or trying to snoop around his secrets, and eventually it had become such a great source of frustration she had imploded on him, informing him - quite peevishly - that she was no longer impressed with his chauvinistic threat. And, somehow, off-the-tip of her tongue, rolled the rebuttal that he was “a demon, or goblin, or devil,” (if not in form, then definitely in personality) and it had stuck.

And, so had spawned her pet-name for him, in a moment of unintended consequence, that he was her ‘divided devil.’

And after a long, steady moment (the irony not being lost on him) he had returned a singular, taut nod. But not without first obtusely confessing that she had been accurate in her assessment (and if she only knew just how right she had been).

But he had confessed it just as he did with anything of importance: indirectly. And like the rest of his story, it had only been a pantomime, a projection of the truth to present (like shadows on the wall).

And it had the opposite intended effect (or, it had the effect he intended) because Heather had suddenly found herself even more attracted to her dark, devilish boyfriend. She had wanted to be with something special, didn’t she? She had wanted to be special. She had wanted to be different than the others.

Better: she had wanted to be the one he kept.

She had wanted to see what it would be like to be fucked by something demonic that had risen from the long, stoic shadows of biblical lore. She had wanted to see what it would be like to run her fingers around the fangs of mythical possibility; to crawl inside the jaws of hyperbole and see how far back she could ride that devil tongue.

In the spectacle of her head, it had all seemed so sexy; so hot.

The metaphor appealed.

That he would prey on her, sex on her – and feed? on her.
And it was hot. The thought of it. The books had told her so. She went to sleep with it, woke with it; tendered the thought, lovingly, night after night by tracing tight circles around her clit.

She imagined how hot it would be, being fucked by a demon.

And they both had been so tremblingly close to it, so close to doing it that it had hurt. Maddeningly, he had made her wait.

And the restraint was hot, too, so she allowed it.

So Heather pleasured herself in the expanse of the wait, thinking about how sexy it would be. And the demon had a face now, a name. She – he – they – could make it happen. Couldn’t they?
Which is why she stayed. Which is why she waited. She wanted more of him; all of him. She wanted to see the real Danny that lurked beneath the surface; the one that had looked at her in a sudden, feral uptick at the night club when first they had met.

Unknown to him, she had created a social media profile, then. It was to earmark the momentous occasions in their life. (What was the point of dating a demon if you couldn’t at least boast about it a little bit?) She knew she was shouting into a void, but she didn’t care. It made her feel good.

“How do I look to you? Shining in your silk?" Said the fly to the spider.

Consume me. I like the pain”

But only if she had known how prophetic that meme would become. (Or how prolific her page would grow).

But, as suggested by her post, she couldn’t help but wonder when he was going to do it.

Heather had been foolishly wise. She knew the slow-drip trail of context clues he had left behind suggested he nursed a fetishistic compulsion for women that tip-toed over the polite boundaries of society. But that had been kind of hot, too, hadn’t it? Being the object of a demon’s desire sounded sexy. Was it all women? Did he demonize them all? Select women? Would it – gasp – be her? Could it be her?

And somehow the thought of being fucked by him and eaten by him had enmeshed.

She had begun slipping curious fingers into herself over that, too; and, strangely, she had found herself responding to the fantasy. She remembered being startled by the contractions of her own orgasm. It was all in abstraction, of course. It was just fantasy. His mouth, his lips, his tongue was hot. So, she extrapolated that being eaten by him would be hot, too.

It was only when this part of their story had become inexorable – when she had begun to wonder about the metaphor, and had begun to touch herself to it, that he had signaled – in that maddeningly knowing way of his – that she was ready for him.

Sex: he had mounted her in a contraction of movement. And she had become a movement of contraction. Everything else fell away. All that was – all that existed – had been this rigid thickness slowly feeding into her.

And he had been - like the rest of him - excessive.

And like everything else with them: it had not been easy. He had to make small movements of negotiation to insert himself. Mentally, she had mapped out the procession: her focus traveling the length of him as she had endeavored to ingest his erection. He had been painfully wide. And what had already been squeezed into her was penetrating pockets of depth that she had only intellectually understood before to exist.

He had been too big; too thick; pushing through her in a way that was alarming. And if ever there had been any reservation over what he claimed he was – a demon – any lingering doubts had evaporated with the sudden, singular plunge of his length.
Her spine curled in shock.

It had hurt. His movements had been stilted, abbreviated; punctuated by her sharp shrieks whenever he went too deep. Groaning, panting, her demon had struggled to fuck her with the patience of a saint.

But bending under his will, being forced to accept his maleness – that had been hot, too.

So, she allowed it.

I thought some of the guys I was with before had been big… shit. Heather could almost laugh at the absurdity of it. None of her past lovers had even come close. Heather had to re-align her belief system.

And it wasn’t just his size, it was also his shape and tensile strength. To say he was as hard as the devil’s brand, and he bruised her just as terribly, would not have been an overstatement.

But he had been good at first, hadn’t he? So good. He had been on his best behavior (but weren’t they all?). He had given her oral sex, often. Said the sweet nothings, enough. Lavished her with the proper attention. Even dozed on the couch with her (his arm around her waist so she wouldn’t fall).

They had traded the in-jokes, the promises, the memes that had begun creating the scaffolding for their relationship. He had given her glimpses of his softer side. And, it took time, but, through some devilish alchemy, he had begun to fit - in her thoughts, her life, her body - so that he could push inside – and the pain had actually transmuted to pleasure.

And, oh God, when she had grown accustomed to him, and he to her, it had become terrifyingly good.

She remembered, vividly, the day she had posted another meme to her profile:

“Your Man Crush Monday #MCM slips out on the third stroke.”

It was a digital benchmark for when the sex between them had become extraordinary. Mind-blowing, even. Danny – bless him – never slipped out, and she – honed to a weapon – never let go. He could pound deep, visceral orgasms out of her, but also rock her into a state of drugged euphoria (and she hadn’t even need her pills in order for him to sweet-fuck her into a tranquilized stupor). He could give her different orgasms; sometimes, even, deliberately.

“When he give you that relationship-dick. #ThatDevilDick.”

They had their ups; their downs. But, then, they had moments like these, where they would return to the bridle path, hand in hand, sharing lewd jokes. They had met in the fall, and after one revolution around the calendar, to the fall they had returned, re-creating their original traipse into the woods.

It had almost become comical at that point – and Heather looked upon the memory of herself with a sympathetic fondness – the lengths to which they would go to make surreptitious their feelings for one another. Like two children in the school yard they had stolen shy smiles and shy kisses, and they had intimated not-quite professions time and time again.

Until.
“I love you.”

Had there been a shy acknowledgment in return?

She could not remember.

It had been the first time it had been said.

And Heather could not remember who, exactly, had said it.

But what she could remember was the canvas. The canvas of: colors, sights, sounds. She could remember the vibrancy of the woven canopy because it had been peeling like a wound that could finally heal.

She could remember this image with such detail, because it had served as the backdrop for the sudden, jerking retreat of his tall frame; retreating, until it became that of a featureless shadow.
And, then, what felt like a cone of silence, gulfed between them.

His face had become a dark study: she could not remember if he had jerked away from their cupped hands because she had said it, or because she had not responded to what had been said.

The sex that evening had been strained; devoid of connection. The small movements of negotiation he had often made to gently penetrate her - because her smallness required it - had sublimated into animalistic pangs. And Heather had bit her tongue to endure it.

The days waxed and waned. And that cone of silence grew wider.

Then: he had stopped asking for sex.

Heather remembered the initial panic, the vain interrogations into his self-exile, the fruitless fishing expeditions asking what went wrong and being rewarded with nothing more than an insouciant shrug. Was he bored of her? Them? The sex?
Had she given up the candy shop too soon? No, she remembered countering, they had waited a respectable amount of time. And, besides, it had been his idea. And, besides-besides, the sex had been electric. (At least for her?)

There was nothing quite like getting fucked by his maleness that was capable of a tactile stretching that subsumed into terrific pleasure… So, what had gone wrong? Was she being too selfish? Were his needs being met?
In a moment of invention, Heather had offered a blowjob, but – to her shock? dismay? confusion? – he had turned it down with a look of shock. (But maybe that had been a small miracle, because, God, how was she ever going to deep
throat him?).

Then.

The sex: it was back, but rougher. And he had stopped kissing her; stopped the interludes with his mouth.

But, that sort of constraint was hot, too. And so, she allowed it.
And fucking her hard? That was hot. So, she allowed that, too. Besides, she had started to get into the much-needed habit of taking a fistful of pills before they sexed; it had helped the pain.

But, it had gotten to a point where there were days Heather could barely tolerate him, and not even the pills could numb his violence. Certain positions had become forbidden, because he could work himself in too deep. And it was not to a depth that she liked. And yet, others… well, those were for the times when he had wanted to hurt her.

But being rutted by him was abjectly painful, at this juncture, and it was not the sort she liked; sometimes there was gratings of tactile pleasure, and rare were the times she was able to eke out any hollow sense of satisfaction, but years of running and athletics had made her unforgivably tight. (And he was just plain unforgivable). But he knew he could overcome her, overwhelm her, and so all pretense had been fucked away.
And there had been times – scary times – the sex had become something ugly, weaponized, and she had screamed for him to stop.

Heather had felt real fear, then. How badly he could hurt her during penetration alone was testament – for her – that he was demon.

And, she had forgiven him that, too, because it had been (secretly) hot.

Then, finally – finally – his mouth had traveled back down to her knees; down, lower, and then moved to her vulva.

And, Heather, distracted by the sheer physicality, had not observed the sudden bestial interest that flickered across his face. But after a few moments of absorbing the sensations he had been giving her, what was not lost to her, made her sit up in alarm: suddenly, it felt like a stranger between her legs.

Their eyes had met in a palpable ripple. And he was as much a stranger then, as he had been on the bridle path, when those three little accursed words had been said.

But who had said it? And the sexual anger emanating from him? Was it because she had said it; or because she had not responded to what had been said?

In the dream, it was as though the confession had been spoken from a ghost’s lips. She could not place the voice.

Heather could hardly remember. But she could hardly afford to forget.

She made an intangible frown. The vision of the dream flickered.

If she had said it first –

If so, that would be her ultimate defeat. The hungry, wild beast knocking at her door would use that power against her forever-more. Because it was when his mouth had been fastened to her pussy, vigorously stroking her clit with a singularity of sensation, pulling a series of gasping, shrieking sounds from her, as she had reached out a hand to push him; him slapping it away; her reaching; him slapping; only to scrape her clitoral flesh

(because his jaw never tired, and why would it with the scores of women he had consumed) — did he try to send her crashing down his throat.

And, Heather remembered, that in a palpable undulation:
her size distorted; her vision knocked upward; her body plunged, as the pill - she had heaved down earlier - suddenly injected into her system, spreading its poisonous kiss — just as his gigantic lips had gaped to invert her into his.

.x.

Heather woke abruptly, rattled by the dream and interludes of memory. The realization she could remember, vividly, how he had attempted to devour her, that fateful evening, felt ominous somehow.

Worse: where was she?

Author’s’ Note:

Who said it first? (if you’ve been following along, you should be able to figure it out )
A brief, necessary interlude, before we get into the size-play.

Chapter 2

Ritual

Heather

It had become her nightly ritual.

Searching, searching.

How she had chanced upon her discovery was peculiar; perhaps, even, fated. It had culminated in a constellation of coincidences that had flowed from her fingertips as she had peppered the keyboard with quick, determined strokes.

The emergence of the idea had been but a germ first, a tiny seedling that had taken form and shape with a hopeful slapdash clattering of keys. It had felt silly and sophomoric at the time, but she had felt compelled to try.

Mouth Camera

Heather looked at the results. She felt snubbed. No; that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. A distillation of results flashed epileptically through the search library.

She saw glimpses of amateur side-reels, visual outtakes, bloopers, even a few auteur cinematic vignettes.

It was close. Frustratingly close, but not what she needed.

Off a sprig of inspiration: Inside Mouth

The cascade of images returned suddenly pivoted toward the medical. Heather scrolled through video thumbnails that felt clinical and outdated.

Heather tapped her chin. She was approaching what she needed. She felt it.

And with some sort of alchemy of coincidence, timing, and clever word gymnastics, through a bevy of images, snapshots, and stilted videography - typing and refining her search, typing and refining - deflecting duds and disappointments, and re-shaping the subsequent queries with more refinement, more instinct: a sudden sublimation happened and a terminology surfaced. It floated to the top.

Endoscopy

Heather stared at the word sitting in the text box. It waited for her. It feel alien, but resonant.

Her hand reached for the mouse; stopped. It felt like an enormity. If she nosed the cursor over the web-page button and hit submit – so simple and effortless a gesture, just one finger-flick – she felt like something alien and terrible would emerge before her.

You can’t unring this bell, Heather Feather

Heather felt a peculiar sobriety fill her as she examined and re-examined the word.

Because she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that the word brandished before her would be the incantation to break the seal on her memories – and that pursuing what stemmed from it would do something even more terrible.

Give her memories context.

Pursuing this strange, resonant word would give vivid, objective meaning to her memories.

And the thought of being able to anchor her bizarre, fantastical memories to something real…

Heather twisted her lip in her teeth, and feeling punitive, feeling masochistic, feeling the absurd need to punish herself - punish him - punish her brain - punish her absurd state of affairs – clicked submit.

Oh shit. Oh fuck

Heather slapped shut her laptop.

It had only been an infinitesimal second, but she had seen something that her subconscious had recognized.

Oh my God. You are being ridiculous. Just open the laptop, Heather. Just do it. Open the goddamn thing

With a swipe of her hand she threw it open.

The video sat indulgent before her in a fantastical stasis, contracted down into a single frame, paused.

Shyly, she peeked through her fingers.

And hit play.

There was no sound. But she watched as the small lens advanced beyond the lips, the teeth, down the length of tongue – Heather gripped her face; her fingers dug into her jaw. The endoscope continued on its trajectory, and she watched, unblinkingly, fasteningly, as it coiled around an architectural shape beneath the curve of the tongue : a geometry of viscera half-cloaked in a vector of shadow that looked…

Heather heaved into her hands. Her head jerked away.

Familiar

She flexed her mouth, her jaw, circled it as she felt the need to heave again.

Her skin prickled. How else could she retain the memory of something that she knew not to even exist in the waking-world until this precise moment?

What the fuck is that? What IS that? That’s in me?

Heather watched in a sort of out-of-body stupefied disbelief as the crescent-shaped epiglottis loomed large into view, stretching from end to end across the screen.

She felt sick.

She felt the cognitive dissonance of a person suddenly, abruptly learning what lay inside their body - for years - without even being remotely aware of it to begin with.

It was like looking at a parasite.

But, worse.

Because as vivid and fanciful as her imagination could be, she would have never, in a million years, have dreamt up such an alien structure existed within her.

Which meant…

I experienced this…

It was awful for how simple it was. And it was simple in its horror because of how elegant it was. And it was elegant because it was, ultimately, simple.

She knew about this parasite, this bodily structure, because she had seen it before.

But how?

Although this - this thing aligned with her memories, she knew it wasn’t the product of her most feverish fantasies because she would have never envisioned something so ugly.

It revolted her. It compelled her. She felt her mental state see-saw as bodily as the video footage before her on the laptop screen. The instability of the footage made it that much more horrific.

In an unseemly fascination she gripped her arms and leaned in. The tongue undulated in an autonomous reflex as the endoscope cable breached the throat.

And Heather covered her face; her mouth. She swallowed - reflexively - as her own autonomous reflex gripped her.

I’m going to be sick

She looked away.

Trembling, she reached her fingers into her desk drawer, felt around the velvet bolster, and –

Fuck

She withdrew. She stared at her hand lamely. Disbelievingly she stared. It felt like she stared for an eternity. Then, finally, she inserted her finger into her mouth

A burble of hysteria went through her as she released it with a pop. How the hell had she fit inside of him? She had tried to trace the topagrophy of it, her presumable size, tried to make sense of the scale by mentally measuring and mapping out where her finger resided.

Holy hell I was small Her face sank into her hands. She felt her lips crumple, and her heart sink heavily, bodily toward her stomach just as the gastric colosseum of the stomach panned onto the screen in the video. And, aware of this in a far-off remote way, this strange inexorable twin-mirrored fate of what was happening in the video, she laugh-cried into the room.

“So, not only did he eat me. But he shrank me, too.”

The hysteria re-doubled.

Shitshitshit. I need more pills. I need…

She looked up. She looked away.

The panorama of the stomach was overwhelming. And to think, that what had happened to her that fateful evening, what had been attempted had a logical sequence of events, and what lay at the terminus of them was that pink bulbous organ, and the possibility that he had desired to send her into it –

“He tried to eat me.” She repeated.

Nervous, she tittered into her hands. It made an awful, chilling kind of sense. All the context clues had been pieced together. And they all made sense; and sensible they were when held together. But when she said it aloud, it kind of fell apart.

“I feel ridiculous.”

She looked down at her pill stash: empty. And she felt the same.

Empty because she sat with the enormity of this. Alone.

“Ok, so,” she continued. If she couldn’t believe it on its face, as it were, then at least she could try to labor to believe it by proxy? Pretend that its construction was an elaborate metaphor?

Except it was, her brain interjected, not a metaphor.

If she had slept, it was undoubtedly a broken sleep. Because when she woke, she felt orphaned. Orphaned by time, orphaned by reality. Alone, and shrinking. And shrinking further. Somehow, having watched the endoscopy footage in one long visual spasm had excavated something from her that she was not yet properly equipped to confront.

Miserable, she rolled from bed. Miserable, she set about her room. Miserable she looked out the windows.

She had foregone breakfast entirely. The thought of all that ugliness in her throat, and all that movement dessicated her desire to eat.

With a shudder she resurfaced from the memory and set about applying the war-paint. Her make-up was simple: a touch of black eyeliner to feather around her demure lashes, and a thicker streak slanted on the eyelid to give a more lasting, dramatic effect.

Cat eyes.

Is that why he had called her Kitten?

Stop

The nickname felt tainted now. She resolved to never use it again.

At least, she thought with a flush of pride, at least he hadn’t taken that away from her.

She still had her identity.

She exited her apartment.

Carefully, she wound her way up the block; vigilant. She avoided all of the cracks.

Most days, she could make it look cat-like, fluid, as though her grace would not permit her feet to land on any of the imperfections in the sidewalk that cleaved through the neighborhood. But today, she felt like invisible ghosts were watching; ghosts from her past that suddenly had light and shape, because she had a genesis for her memories now, and she had seen it in the endoscopy video.

I feel like I’m being watched

Troubled, she tried to outpace her thoughts as she moved through the city-neighborhood.

The poor, dilapidated neighborhood that appeared to be in perpetual motion: crumbling.

In order to avoid her previous life, she had moved to – what her father would call – the wrong side of the train tracks. This hamlet that branched off from the industrial district peeled open like a discarded carcass; the inhabitants lingered like flies, desperate to leave but unsure of how to escape their only food-source. It left a lot to be desired but Heather had found its despairing charm strangely comforting.

Here, the people were unconcerned with social cues or fashionable trends; here they survived. But despite its suffering – or, perhaps, because of it – there was a sense of community. The older folks would wave and wish her a good day from their stoops, the little ones playing in the sidewalk with chalk would smile up at her with their missing front teeth – and infected by their good humor, Heather would often find herself returning a smile of her own.

See? Not so ugly after all

Simple people. Simple pleasures.

He wouldn’t take everything. She wouldn’t let him ruin her completely.

However, often slinking between the kind matrons and the innocent children (not yet hardened by the streets) were the breed of vermin that put her on edge. The kind that would leer at her from the warehouse, everyday.

It was enough to make Heather’s face curdle in anger. But she walked by with head held high.

Yet, the brazen show of lust was unsettling. Heather hadn’t been in the company of a man since… well, what had happened. She had found herself unable to accept their advances. Kissing, tonguing, it had all felt too analogous to being tasted.

Yet, the men here seemed to want themselves inside of her rather than – well, rather than the other way around – she thought with a humorless laugh. She had found some form of ironic comfort in that, no matter how small. At least they were honest with their intentions.

A crack in the sidewalk loomed up at her, snagging her feet. This one… this one was different. It was not like the other thin fractures that cut across the hard ground, this one was like –

It’s like a mouth

It was thin on either side, and widened at the middle. It was a yawning mouth staring up at her in that same fantastical stasis she had seen in the endoscopy video.

Sweat trickled down her skin.

Fuck, fuck, fuck! Not now. No goddamn panic attacks now! Not here! Not in broad daylight!

She was right in front of that damnable warehouse and they were sure to be witness to this as she stared at the crack like a maniac.

No, please God not right now! Just turn the corner Heather! The fucking drugs are right around the corner!

A pair of hands gripped her shoulders and yanked her free.

Chapter 3

Fingered

Heather

“Joseph!” Heather cried out, heart hammering. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Sorry. You were…well you looked like you needed to be snapped out of whatever th-that was,” he remarked sheepishly.

Ever the book-worm, Heather privately regarded Joseph as her savior. Young men like him were canonized many tines over, in the very many novels of beauties and beasties that populated her very many bookshelves. He was, very much like his literary effigy: an anachronistic saint. Perched at the end of his nose was a set of red-rimmed glasses which did little to detract from his hazel eyes. They were too soulful.

Where’s your flock, Joey?

Joseph, her shepherd. And against his better (best) judgment, he would lead Heather to her poisoned chalice. A moment in time, would be a moment in divine: he would do anything for Heather. He would bend over backwards for a damaged girl like her: one he could take care of, one that would make him feel masculine and capable. A woman, whose rough coarse edges could be made smooth by his saintly aspirations.

And saintly they were. He had been working at the pharmacy for the better part of a year, handing out medication to the disadvantaged. It was a legally adjudicated practice, established by political fiat by a congressional sycophant, but it still required a doctor’s note. And Heather had no note to her name.

Heather had consistently, with a fearsome singularity of focus, refused to seek therapy. How could she? The words never left her lips.

And she had a new one now that was starting to nest in the bee-hive of her brain. It had become parasitic; latching onto the underside of her. She went to bed with it. She woke with it, she –

“Endoscopy,” Heather blurted. “Joey, what do you know about that?”

Joseph looked at her, startled. “That’s random, Heather.”

Heather suddenly looked up at her companion. “It – I… I, uh, what is it exactly? I mean, I have an idea, it just,” she shrugged, and after a clever, calculated second: “YouTube Rabbit hole, you know how it is.”

“Ah, all too familiar,” Joseph responded. With a twitch of his lab-coat arm, he eased open the door to the pill dispensary.

You wouldn’t do that, Heather thought silently. You wouldn’t do that to me, Joey. You wouldn’t subject me to ‘endoscopy.’

Not Joseph. Never Joseph. He was too kind. Too saintly. Too perfect. Which is why Heather had never projected signals of interest; and he, too polite, had never even ventured to try.

No; you like them rough, don’t you, Heather? You want them to fuck you coming and going.

“Well, it’s a medical procedure,” he began airily, as he took his erstwhile companion to the back room.

Heather half-listened as the pharmacy technician began an effortless, uninterrupted dissertation that at junctures where mere mortals would normally need to breathe, Joseph brightly carried on with detectable excitement.

Off her look: "Sorry. Medical stuff gets me excited. Especially since I want to study to become a gastroenterologist. "

Heather barked a humorless laugh.

In the posterior of the store there was an annexed area, one where the employees would linger between shifts. The front desk woman looked up as they transited, smiling a knowing smile. Heather resented her. She probably thinks I’m gonna suck him off for some pills. Mad world.

They left the front desk woman in their wake and advanced into the storage room proper.

Heather resigned herself to one of the stiff blue chairs standing vigilant by the coffee table. Anxious, she thumbed through an old magazine. A glossy magazine spread for indigestion medication materialized. Frustrated, she flung the magazine to the floor. (Besides, the drawing of the mouth in the insert had been too stylized to be accurate, and it was frustrating her further because how was she ever to learn what happened to her if -

Fortunately, Joseph returned, saving her from her racing thoughts. It was a shame she couldn’t just buy a bottle off him. The regular pittance he normally offered her wouldn’t last more than a week. But as he explained (in his saintly voice) he was filching from the stock. A bottle would be noticed, but –

“…a few pinches” Joseph said in unison with Heather’s returning chorus. It was their refrain, and they had grown to enjoy it. “Like always. Since if I take anything else, it’ll be noticed.”

Joseph handed Heather the pharmacy bag. In a spasm she clutched it. “All there?”

He nodded. “One to sleep, one to calm your nerves if you have another panic attack. And one to feel like you’re floating on air.”

Heather began to rise –

“Wait, Heather. Sit.”

She did. (Surprisingly). In fact, so surprised was she by this turn of character, that she was not even sure it had been a cognitive decision. She simply had.

He sat down in the chair beside her, leaning in, back hunched like a beaten cur. “You don’t talk to me anymore… Sure, we meet up once a week and do - do this - but, man, Heather, I’m risking serious jail time doing this. And I don’t even know why I’m doing it.”

Heather hardened. “No.”

Off her tone: “Heather?”

“No. I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me to open up and talk. And I told you, Joey, I told you, I’m not going to do that.”

“Something happened to you. You were free spirited and happy. The life of the party! Now you – what – hide inside like a crazy cat lady and pop pills? Come on, just let me in. Let someone in!”

Heather didn’t even look at him. She sat in the enormity of what had happened in that terrible bodily silence.

“D-did… did he hurt you? Your… the guy you’ve been dating. The one… he…”

Heather felt a coolness, a numbness whisk inside her.
Had he hurt her? Doubtless, they had had their squabbles; their tiffs; their outbursts. But his every argument, his every gesture had loosened Heather from her moorings. She had become unleashed, unabashed, and had begun meeting him stroke for stroke: in bed, in conversation, in ego.

In physicality.

If she was honest - perfectly honest - with herself, she would have, with all of its complications, complexities, and conflictions, dissected her relationship down along its seams into neat, taxonomical slices of abuse.

Heather felt lost, then. To be asked so directly had rattled free a memory as painfully as anatomical dissection.
Wrestling with the knowledge of whether he had wanted to hurt her or pleasure her had plagued her days and nights. It felt like everything - everything - he did had the unspoken potential of becoming violent. There had been an intangible quality to him that had always felt feral. (Once an appealing trait had now become something vexing to Heather). The oral sex he performed had been emblematic of this. Heather knew he had been bribing her with his tongue (seeking her clemency) whenever he’d bring her to flawless orgasm; she had resented this, relished it, hated it, loved it, because it had felt sacred, apologetic when he did it, even if it was licentious bribery. Each tongue stroke had felt like it was an apology for the times he had hurt her. (Or she hurt him).
And that was the seduction of it, wasn’t it? He could be cruel; but he could also be sorry. So sorry. So very, very sorry.

Lost to the memory, Heather resurfaced, and looked over at Joseph. “I… I don’t know. We were… complicated.”

“Complicated enough that you need to pop pills?! Jesus, H-town. What happened between you two?”

“Endoscopy,” she said lamely.

“What?”

In a moment of invention: "He - we - I … we argued over the term for it, and we got into this stupid fight, and - "

He tried to eat me, her brain supplied.

Heather felt brittle, like she would crack. This was the closest she had ever gotten to admitting, out loud, what had happened, to anyone. "It got pretty bad. It got violent – "

I think he tried to swallow me

“And…” Heather’s voice evaporated. She looked at Joseph with wounded eyes. A quiet universe of pain. She urged him, telepathically, to understand, to see - to see - through the verbal sleight-of-hand and observe the ugly truth running parallel to her fantastical metaphor, and –

With great intuition: “He… molested you?”

Heather could scream. Heather could cry. It was all so close.

She was drowning. Drowning with the need to say something, anything, to her spectacled savior. And whatever fault lines Joseph saw in her, he amended with a gasp: “He raped you?”

Bless him. Joseph could scarcely say the word. And Heather inured herself to this. She offered a silent, taut nod.

If she couldn’t explain what had happened in the black-letter of the law, then she would - God help her - get him on the same wavelength as this elaborate metaphor, so, then, at the very least she could milk him for his sympathies, and receive her precious (precious) pills, untroubled.

Left to his own reverie, it would seem, Heather daintily plucked the brown pill bag from the table and made hasty exist, but not before wondering if she had broken the poor boy, because he still had not moved from his seat, even as she strode under the soft, silvery tinkle of the dispensary bell.

That Evening

She ignored her phone for quite some time out of spite.
It had went off again, a minor reminder that there was a text waiting.

Wait.

A prickle of curiosity. Maybe it was Joseph? Maybe she forgot something at the drug store? Was it work calling? Is it that sassy slut who thinks she runs the place? It’s a florist shop for chrissake, not a modeling agency. There was no ‘perfect bouquet.’

In a cloud of thoughts, Heather entered her apartment with a huff, slapping the brown paper bag down on the table. It toppled over gracelessly, and her precious, precious pills clattered free.

She stared down at the sordid collection.
They were what her father would call ‘horse pills’. Too big and too hard to swallow.

Would I have been too hard to swallow?

Fuck! She could slap herself.

Heather pulled a face and walked resignedly into the kitchen.

She felt its every waxy inch. Heather nearly gagged. The quick wash of water disposed the pill down her throat.

Was it this? Was this what it felt like to swallow a tiny human?
Did he – uncontrollably, her thoughts wormed free from the pocket in her brain – did he feel it? That bolus, that sensation lodged in her throat, did he feel that? The pressure in her chest as it moved beneath her ribs: did a tiny human traveling through him move the same way?

Fuck aren’t these pills supposed to stop the bad thoughts?

Troubled by her thoughts, and unsure how to reconcile them, she tried to outpace them: she crawled into a nest of pillows on the bed, and fished her phone free.

She was lilting. Laying on a cloud. She scanned through her emails (doggedly ignoring the one, errant text message), and she saw that her application for apprenticing at the Cosmetic Atelier, uptown, had been accepted. It would appear that working at a floral shop for the better part of her young adult life would pay sizable dividends. The hiring manager had thought she had potential: and she could see the glimmering promise of an artist in Heather’s sketch portfolio.

And, suddenly, Heather felt a sudden lift, a buoyant updraft of what could only be optimism. Perhaps, she could do this after all. Maybe – just maybe – she wouldn’t just survive, but she could thrive.

The pill was melting away her inhibitions, loosening her mind, she felt like she could stretch; forever.

The phone buzzed again. She ignored it.

Instead, Heather, reasoned, in order to celebrate, she would abort her current efforts, and detour into more ministerial acts.

Because it had become something of a religion hadn’t it? No; a ritual. Still, it persisted.

Heather sat a little taller; a little more upright. She typed the sacrosanct word into the text-box field.

And she was rewarded with her feed; her feed that, due to repeat alchemical reactions, was becoming more and more curated – in fact, the search engine seemed to take on a nigh-sentient ability, because the latest cropping of videos were exactly what she needed.

There was, she learned, a small, gifted population of people (nameless, faceless) that could ingest their own endoscopes. And unlike the unflattering, stilted video footage she had procured originally from medical archives, these were entirely different.

Heather knew, immediately - only as a madwoman could - that these videos were voyeuristic. And the host was possessed of a talent that distilled down into what she realized was an uncanny ability to control the motility of the mouth and throat.

Rapt, she watched. Unblinking, she watched. The drugs in her bloodstream conscripted in her an ability to see the images with arresting clarity.

The red of the reds. The black of the blacks. The raised texture of the tongue like very many cobblestones.

She felt safe in her nest of pillows. So she permitted the footage to play, uninterrupted. The pill had certainly imbued a soft, relaxing aura. Normally, at this juncture, she would have paused the video in an alarmed spasm.

But, tonight, as a silent reprisal against her erstwhile lover (imagining she was needling his oh-so-fabulously constructed ego) she deliberately forged ahead. She watched the precise moment the epiglottis flattened itself, neatly and –

Christ

The esophagus, appearing as nothing more than fault lines in the throat at first, suddenly peeled open.

Trembling, Heather leaned in. But the video smashed to black.

Shaking. She was shaking. She had not even been aware of it.

All of those shapes, those lines, those contours, they were horrifically familiar. No: they were not the lines, or shapes of her ex boyfriend’s oral cavity (and she dare not wonder why she knew this so affirmatively), but they were familiar to her in that…

That was a guy’s mouth She felt squeamish. The others, she realized suddenly, had been mouths attached to women.

But this one, this mouth. It was a guy’s.

So, there appeared to be a division of the sexes in the fetish. For fetish it was. Heather sensed that the intention of the filmmaker was to take their videography and charge it with an erotic undercurrent.

While she could appreciate the effort, it was certainly lost on her.

She was repulsed by it. Fascinated by it. Perhaps she steeped herself in it in order to armor herself against it. Be that as it may, she had started watching these more erotic versions, because the more slow, sensual presentation (unlike the medical ones) afforded her the luxury to actually see the environment (instead of the garish chaos of medical footage) and study the bodily architecture in great detail.

To what end, she was unsure. But she felt it was critical she do this, every night. It was critical she understand.

Understand what happened to her.

It did little to inspire though. The only thing these nightly rituals succeeded in doing, was fortify her belief - however absurd - that she had been in the very areas of her boyfriend’s mouth and upper throat where the endoscope had transited in those stranger’s videos.

So, he had never swallowed her. Small miracles, I guess.
But that left her raw with a new reality that was even more potent and dangerous; one now exacerbated by confusion: Why?

An entire universe lay in that single syllable.

Why had he rejected her?
Similarly, she realized, she was still rejecting that lone, errant text message.

It felt good. It felt good to be in control. It felt good to operate from such spite. It felt good to lie to Joseph, it felt…

Heather suddenly gasped back a panic. What was happening to her? What kind of monster was she becoming? Why was she undergoing some metamorphosis after escaping her erstwhile boyfriend? Certainly, he had lied often, cajoled readily, and twisted the truth to suit his purpose. But did that mean she did, too? Did she have to?

Well, you’ve certainly learned from the best, Heather.

Feeling contrite (and a smidge guilty) she finally thumbed away the rest of her open windows, and searched out the text message that had been pitifully chirping at her the better part of an hour.

Sorry, Joseph. Didn’t mean to leave you on read. I just don’t want to think about you, because thinking about you means I have to think about me. And what a monster I am.

Heather clicked to retrieve the message by rote.

She shrieked.

What

Heather caught her breath, panting. What was that? What was she looking at? Her subconscious brain had registered it long before her higher-mind ever had. But whatever she saw, she wanted to reject it from her reality.

Instead, she glanced down again.

No.

The phone clattered from her hands. She jerked back like it was a viper. Her fingers tightened, smothering her mouth. Blood coursed through her veins so quick that she felt like she would drop down on the hardwood floor and loose that precious pill. Right then and there.

No, I’m seeing it wrong. I’m seeing things.

Bracing herself, she looked down at the screen again.

It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. What she was seeing didn’t naturally register. But it did. She knew what she was looking at. Determined to confront the image, she studied it. Her chin jerked up in alarm. That’s me. Of course, she knew that. It was a photograph of herself, taken from a distance.

But.
There was an object, two of them, blocking her back in a way that looked suspiciously like they were - Oh God, no - like they were –

Little Heather had enjoyed such optical wizardry in her youth, hadn’t she? Playing with perspectives and distance was a time-honored tradition.

But this was not the innocent, fanciful play of a child.

This was –

The two objects – fingers – superimposed on her tiny body as they were, at the distance she stood, appeared to be gigantic in form, holding her upright.

A god holding an ant.

Having opened the text message by rote, she had overlooked the sender. It wasn’t Joseph. It wasn’t her spectacled saint. How could it ever be Joseph? She had no saint. She had no savior.

And, a sudden follow-up text.

Unknown: In my neck of the woods today?

No, of course not. Heather was not allowed nice things. Heather wasn’t allowed peace.

She had only this. This cancer of the silence that stretched between them. Of what he had done. And what she had survived. And that she knew. And that he knew she knew. And he would mock her for it.

And, so typical of him, he was coming at her like a snake: sideways. Neither confessing to his sin, nor dismissing it.

Asshole

And in what could only be termed a spiteful lunge of her finger, Heather retaliated by sending – with what felt like telepathic whiplash – one of the endoscopy videos she had been watching.

Heather: Dis you?

A long immeasurable second passed. And Heather had not the luxury of that second to contemplate what she had done, what she was doing, that she was engaging him real-time, and permitting him to move ever-closer (she could almost feel him) when she responded with what she hoped to be equally unruffled glibness, when her cell phone chimed an incoming text.

Unknown: That?! That amateur-hour shit?!

Heather: Oh, of course. Silly me. Since you’re such a professional and all.

Unknown: We aim to please.

Heather: Fuck off.

Unknown: Aw, cute. So pissy. Hugs, not drugs, kitty cat.

Heather lifted her finger to type; stopped.
Subtlety was his craft. Suddenly, she understood.

Oh God.
Her heart stopped.

He knows, oh God, oh shit, he knows. He knows where I get my pills

And, in that uncanny way of his, of being able to answer her, in an almost-telepathic whiplash:

Unknown: You’ve got me curious, Heather Feather. How bad is it? You gonna lead me back to your hidey-hole?

Chapter 5

Climax, Part I

Heather

“Heather, I can’t. I have work in a few hours. Call the police or something.”

Heather stared mutely at the far-wall; the calendar; the violated pillow; the palpable disturbance to the bedsheets; the decapitated toilet.

And a sound lifted from her lips, it spoke ghostly into the mouthpiece. It was, she realized, her voice, and she was speaking. “…sure. okay.”

(faintly) – “I can come over later, though, ok? After work. Promise.”

But his response fell on deaf ears. His disembodied voice receded from the foreground as she slipped the phone into her pocket.

Alone. Heather turned in a tight, worrisome circle. It felt like her center had fallen out.

And as though conspiring with her thoughts, in that maddeningly knowing way of his, a text came through with a palpable vibration.

She looked at the text.

Unknown: Come get.

Peevishly, she shoved the phone back down into her pocket –
but not before it went off again.

He had sent a follow-on text.

Curious, she looked down at the image on her screen. At first she could not understand what she was seeing. The photograph seemed to be –

It had the contours, the lines, the slow, indulgent emergence of shapes that were hauntingly familiar to her, and in a moment of dissonance, the memory of the endoscopy video in its fantastic stasis bled through, seemingly overlapping with –

Oh my God.

A cold, hot-headed feeling swam up her neck. She threw up.

For the message that had so-teasingly followed on the heels of the first could have been a sophomoric prank or a religious perversity. It was a tight, close shot of the purple pill lying on the bed of his tongue, framed by the curl of his lips; the smooth muscle was extended, vibrant against the backdrop of neutral colors, the tip curled ever-so slightly in a come-hither flick.

Panic: panic such that she never felt before entered her system, and it was a fear so mounting she could not feel it.

And simply for the reason that he had her precious pills, she felt bereft.

Mine she mewled softly.

She stared at the photo. Her pupils widened, taking in the image; it branded itself against her skin, her eyes. It was wholly him; his mouth. For if there was one gripping, intimate piece of knowledge she retained from watching the endless visual cacophony of endoscopy videos, was that no two mouths were alike. They were all uniquely different, and differently unique. And it was idiosyncratic, but, Heather had also realized – over time – that the mouths between the sexes were also different.

The men: more angular and cavernous; commanding.
The women: more soft, and wilting; dainty.

And some - both male and female - were inherently attractive.

And this mouth – this one, because it was an extension of him, she need not see the whole of him to sense, to know, to understand its personality. It was simultaneously a liaison that did the bidding of his body, but also an alien part that seemed to wield its own sentience.

His tongue: privately commanding her, seeking to milk more of her ruination with so simple a flick.
His lips: seeking to suckle on her fear by conspiring with his red throat.

And, like a petal – or a lovely lady engloved in purple – the pill sat in repose on his red tongue; glistening ever-so faintly from a vaporous sheen.

No; none of those mouths, those oral cavities had looked like this one. This one was imbued with so much character, so much personality that it held about it an intangible quality: a darkly-seductive menace.

It was not lost on her that – despite its intangible menace – even his mouth was inherently aesthetic, sexual. But in the lines of his jaw she could see the lust of the rapist.

I have to leave. I have to get out of here. It’s a death trap in here

I have to survive

And she did not know how not to. So, on she went in her own procession of stilted movements; moving slowly, moving carefully as though any abrupt movements would shatter her.

Slowly, she extracted the army knife from the back of her sock drawer. Slowly, she slipped the phone back into her pants. And slowly she placed the knife in her front pocket.
I’ll take you down with me.

“I’ll cut you open.” She whispered, voice wavering. “I’ll kill you before you kill me.”

And like a small, petrified woodland animal she slowly shambled forward, out the door, beginning her walk to work for three rather justified reasons.

One: her backseat would be the ideal place for someone to hide.

Two: she wouldn’t be alone outside. There was no way he would just take her in plain sight. (Right?)

And three: with the way she was trembling – violently at that – she was in no position to drive.

.x.

Heather kept moving, looking over her shoulder. Again and again. Jumping at every passerby – man, woman or child.

But time had passed in a sonorous drone, and her phone remained silent. Between her apartment and work there had been nothing but the mundane whoosh of cars and the soothing chatter of the neighbors to accompany her.

Simple sounds. Simple people.

You shouldn’t be here. He was out of place. This was her place, her safe zone. The kindly waving folks and the innocent children playing in vaporous clouds of chalk, all of this – this was her world. Not his.

You don’t belong here you son of a bitch.

Once, Heather had loved his “big talk.” She had been a girl on the cusp of womanhood when she met him. Hailing from college with spotless grades, clean slates and sharp thoughts. In her former life she could party and partake of the social customs – it was an art – but she had come to quickly realize that the cultural rituals of young adults was beneath her. They had become trite and boring. And from within the rabble of bad boys with the leather jackets and dyed Mohawks – coming at her in a Technicolor-sea of disappointing machismo — what emerged was the vivid realization that what she had been craving for, searching for, was a man.

And – he had been that man.

Fuck had he ever. He had his little girl wrapped around his finger in a cleavage-bearing tube top dying for his attention.

Maybe that’s why I hate him.

Not because he had tried to eat her. But because she had loved every fucking second of being his pretty little doll up until the precise moment he had made her into one.

Fuck.

Dream-like, Heather dropped her head into her hands. Enough time had lapsed since the morning that she was left feeling displaced and despondent. (And she stole furtive glances at the photo of his mouth).

It’s him. It’s really him. He… th-that was his mouth. That was his. Everything I remembered, everything I remembered about it was real. He knew her so well, so perfectly well that he knew enough to know that a simple candid photo of his mouth cradling her pill would break her world.

It was, she thought with a chill, befitting of any predator: that he know his prey better than they know themselves. Prey, her mind echoed back hollowly. Is that what I am? Again, she looked at the photo. It was him. So him. So him. That mouth, the one that haunted her dreams, she knew it with a feverish obsessive intimacy.

It was a feverish, obsessive intimacy - that she knew - was not entirely her own.

And that scared her more than anything. This was not the coalescent, faithful need of a lover. This was the ugly, guttural need of a mad dog that had clamped its jaws down over something tender.

I have to keep moving. That’s all. Just… keep moving. One little falter and he’d see it. He would see her weakening and –

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Tammy snapped.

Heather jumped up, startled.

The other woman was looking down at her, her soft brown skin radiating in the lurid glow of the fluorescent lights. She was pretty with her smooth even features and requisite diva mole, but her personality was loathsome.

Somehow, the hours had waxed and waned in the quaint little flower shop, and with the depleting day Heather’s anxieties had receded into a tingle of white-noise. But, now, the day was coming to a close, which meant she would have to help with closing.

“Nothing Tammy. What do you want?” Heather looked at her challengingly, which was no small feat, sitting upon a dilapidated, dusty box.

She popped a little green bubble in her mouth, smacking the gum carelessly. “That time-a night, Heatha. You do da stockin’ and I’ll count ta cash regista.”

Sure, Heather thought silently, so you can slip a few twenties into your pocket and walk out sight unseen.

But Heather made no protest: the mindless task of lifting boxes and storing them in the back had given her a simple, meditative quiet and she relished it. In the solitude of her labor she had begun mentally analyzing what her next move would be. Maybe she would call Joseph and have him drive by her house? Hold him to the promise he made? Have him call her with regularity to make sure she was still of this earth?

Preoccupied by her thoughts, and the soul-deep good feeling of working her hands and her legs, she looked down in silent appreciation at them. Track, she remembered hearing herself say, as his lips had wandered down to her breast bone. Bet I could outrun you. It was the only reason she had survived that night. The moment her body had returned to normal she had torn off, running and yowling like a mauled cat.

I had waltzed into the wolf’s den and that’s no place for your average pussy cat.

Even now Heather could remember her bare feet beating against the pavement: she had been nude, and she had collided with her parked car; wrung the door open, flung herself inside, and peeled off the property, the wheels spinning three hundred and sixty three days ago.

Tammy was looking at her pointedly. Her respite would be short-lived; work would not offer her the sanctuary she had been hoping for. She wouldn’t be able to stay the night, either.

“Fine, I’ll go,” Heather made a resigned sound and reluctantly got to her feet.

She left the flower shop, and entered the arms of dusk.

.x.

She returned to her apartment. Her arm wilted down by her side. Out of habit she had reached into her secret stash. But, there was no use plunging her hand into the flush mechanics to fish out the ziploc bags, because her pills were no longer there.

Feeling bereft, she crumpled down onto her bed. She retrieved her phone; opened the messages, and feeling the same irresistible impulse, braved the inevitability of the panic, and once again, looked at the photo.

She felt a terrible sadness, a loneliness enter her. She hugged herself. Her skin began to prickle.

And there was a knock at her door.

Heather froze.

And there was a sound emanating from it, from the other side that was sealed away, tucked from her reality, and the sound was stretching across the length of room, seeking her out, and it was – she realized – a voice: it was speaking.

"Oh, Joey,” she whispered, trembling in the after-shock of startlement: “I forgot about you.”

She began tearing apart her make-shift barricade. Desks, end-cabinets, chairs, they were all removed with a startling efficiency. Joey, hold up, I’m coming
And a sudden madness seized her. She didn’t want to be alone. Not now. Not ever. To be alone meant she would be an easy target. Easy prey. Faster she went, harder, until at last she upended the final obstruction with a most-satisfying thunk.

But Joey must have been wresting the door knob with his hands, a hair-trigger second away from bursting through it in his own desperation, because she had scarcely relieved the final weight from it, when it burst open –

.x.

– and the bright crinkle of the door chime sounded pleasantly. He stepped quietly into the flower shop.

Looking up, he became immediately aware of two things.
One: that he was not alone, and two: a most delectable woman-shaped specimen was peering at him, her hand sliding surreptitiously through the cash register draw.

Cocking his head to the side he gave her a forward once-over. “Uh-oh. Hand in the cookie jar?” Then he gave her a sympathetic look. "Don’t worry, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Tammy looked up in mortification.

But without missing a beat, he continued airily: “Heather’s not here, huh?" He set his hip in a casual lean up against the counter. See? I’m harmless. "She go home?”

Funny, cuz I was just there. Man, Heather, we dance around one another don’t we?

Tammy snapped back from the register. The cash scattered in a brilliant green explosion. Without thinking, she set down on her hands and knees, scrambling to collect it like a cat trying to gather a cloud of feathers.

“I don’t know what yeh talkin’ 'bout.” She snapped. And not even bothering to look up, she continued snatching the money from off the dusty floor planks. “Who-a yuh anyways?”

The stranger relaxed into his role. He allowed the common tongue to slip through. It was verbal camouflage; mimicry. See? I’m one of you.

“Oh, justa… friend,” he answered demurely, sliding around the counter slowly. “Well, no; actually thas not true. We were togetha’ for a while, me and Heatha’. We had a falling out.” He shrugged. "But we’re still friends. I wanted ta check up on her. Make sure she’s okay.” Sudden inspiration struck him: “She’s not wit that Joseph guy, is she? I don’t trust that type. Specially since he’s dealin’ in pills an’ all’a that shit.”

He moved closer; but slowly, gradually. If she looked up and attempted to recall how close he had been to the door, she wouldn’t have been able to tell with any honesty if he had moved further into the shop.

A creak.

Tammy looked up.

The stranger had moved abreast of her, shifting forward silently And, blessedly distracted by the money, he had slid one shoe forward to settle it down on Tammy’s fingers.

“What! Fuck!”

Tammy’s shoulders rolled in whiplash. But before she could open her mouth to protest, he caressed the top of her hand with the instep. “Nuh-uh. That’s not yours.”

“Get off my fucking hand!”

“Nope. But, you can do me a favor. Call Heather. I need you to find out if our little girl has got company.”

.x.

The phone rang.

Heather jumped. Joseph started.

"Who is it?” he asked, visibly flustered.

"Tammy. Why is Tammy calling me? Tammy never calls me.” Dread began to race up and down Heather’s arms, grating palpably against her withdrawal tremors. Breathlessly, she held the phone to her ear and connected the call.

“Tammy?”

Heather shot Joey a warning look. Be quiet, her eyes said.

Then, returning to the phone: “Tammy… is…” Heather took a deep, calming breath, and continued. “Is there a man there?"

Yes.

Tammy had said quietly. Heather’s heart dropped; it began beating hollowly in the pit of her stomach.

“You need to… you need…give him the phone, Tammy. I’ll talk to him.”

The sound of a scuffle.

.x.

He wrenched the phone free.

And he was suddenly, vividly alive; back bowed, hairs on end. Would Heather speak? Would she speak to him? The thought of hearing it cupped inside his ear sent a sudden, anticipatory shudder through him. He listened intently.

But there was nothing.

The silence stretched on as something he would call expressive.

And, it dragged on resiliently.

He could feel the intensity of her rebellion.

He couldn’t resist the vicious smile. Defiant to the end. That was his Kitten.

And, unable to contain himself a moment longer, he uttered a cajoling: “Well?”

.x.

His voice.

Heather’s teeth came together in a spasm.

To hear it again, to hear it speaking to her, she felt dizzy, faint. It was a sickly relief to know that it was no longer a ghostly memory, nor the shadow sliding through her nightmares – it was, instead, a true, vocal sound. An utterance made by a man. By a living person.

He was uncaged from her nightmares.

“You,” she whispered.

She refused to say his name; to think it; to indulge it.

A peculiar mania went through her. She almost laughed.

She had tried to unknown him, hadn’t she? She had tried to render him nameless, faceless. To excise his identity. But in her attempt to unknown him, she had ascended him, exalted him; and he had re-surged as a surreptitious entity that needn’t a name to stir her to fear.

Because there was nothing more horrifying than a name. And nothing more intimate than the utterance of a name. Because a name was the connective tissue to her surreal reality. A reality in which he had tried to ingest her.

“It’s been a while.” She had to dig her nails into her palm to keep focused. “Back off Tammy. She’s not who you’re here for.” That unfortunate person is me.

Heather walked to the living room window and peered out into the setting sun, the town open to her vision was basked in a warm orange glow. It’d be dark soon. Wolves hunted in the night. “Wh-what do you want?”

.x.

He looked down at the phone. She was speaking. Speaking to him. And it was not the approximation of what he heard in his day-dreams. It was her. It was his Heather.

Her voice: the sweet soprano with its lush, throaty cadence… Oh God. How he missed that. He simply, plainly missed her.

But, his throat tightened. He had missed out on the opportunity to have her, too. Didn’t’ he?

And after what felt like a biblical lifetime – he finally spoke.

"That’s a loaded question, Kitten. But, for starters: you. " And after a clever moment: “Alone.”

(from the earpiece) “But, I am alone…”

“Are you?” He lowered the cell phone so that it could project the sound, and jammed his shoe down on Tammy’s fingers.

.x.

There was a vivid, hollow crack.

Heather torqued her body away from Joseph. She squeezed her eyes against the wet, unctuous sound of ligament tearing, bone breaking, the shrill shuddery sound of Tammy screaming.

“STOP.” Stop it her brain commanded. “Just stop. I - fine. OK… I’ll do it. I’ll tell him to go home.”

Then, she spoke in Joey’s general direction, her voice both carrying its command to her awkward companion whilst also wafting over the mouthpiece: “Go home… Joey. Just go. I… I don’t think it’s a good idea if you stay. Don’t do anything stupid like call the cops, and don’t try to come back. Just go.”

But Heather flicked her chin toward the closet.

Bless him. Joesph played along, moving the furniture from the front door before opening it and shutting it for dramatic effect.

With practiced finality: “He’s gone,” Heather pronounced. “Now leave Tammy alone.”

Heather ended the call. She turned to Joseph. "If I need you I’ll call. But don’t come out a second before that. Got it?”

Like an obedient puppy, Joey nodded his head. And without further instruction he slid into the closet, closing it tight behind him.

Heather moved over to the bed. She killed the lights.

She picked up Joseph’s pistol.

.x.

Tammy was a female apostrophe: curled on the floor in silent punctuation. She had involuntarily shriveled into the fetal position.

In a boneless spasm she clutched her broken hand. Her head lolled back to look up at her aggressor.

He retracted his foot.

And without a parting glance he strode from the flower shop.

He made his away across town; there was no spring to his step, no merriment to his stride. Only the steep, purposeful strides of a hunter compelled.

The lines of the apartment complex etched into view. The windows on the facade were dark and un-shuttered like lidless eyes.

And mantled by the dark, he entered the lobby. He retraced his steps. He knew them by heart.

To: the foyer.
Up: the stairs.
Down: the hall.

His pace quickened.

He broke into a full run.

He charged down the hallway.

And stopped.

Delicately, he sniffed the air. Heather.

Scenting, tasting, he turned, hunting like a blind snake.

In two, quick purposeful strides he moved to the door.

He leaned in closer, intent. Every nerve alive. Every tendon flexed. Every breath calculated, controlled. He stood, hovering; scenting.

He was vigilant, alert; every nerve and sense on end. What booby traps you got laid out for me? His ears pricked forward. Where was she? A primal excitement curdled in his stomach.

After a long moment, he placed his hand on the door – as though with that gesture alone he could feel her, sense her – and pushed.

The door creaked open. It was the emittance of a single cry –

.x.

– that bugled from Joseph’s throat as he charged into the living room.

Heather shrieked at the eruption.

Joseph lofted the knife high into the air, and swung.

Heather sprang from her cover and ran.

She bolted out the door; but not before first sensing, feeling, absorbing an undulation of movement.

There was a single yelp; the punctuation of a shoe scrape, and an athletic shunt of weight.

Don’t look back. Just run. You stop, you die

“Track!” She shouted. “Remember?!”

Her heart was pulsing. Her feet were pounding.

It was an explosion of sounds, of colors. The world whipped through her in a diorama of lines and circles.

Shapes ushered into her vision; sounds cut through her ears.

And she pushed herself.

Her breath burned in her throat. But on she ran.

Each heel strike was loud, discordant; it was a slamming, a banging in her ears that echoed inside her head. It was deafening, especially in counter-point to the procession of swift, fleet sounds that were suddenly, terrifyingly coming from behind.

He’s chasing me.

Like a wolf-dog in hot pursuit, the chase had his blood up. It was driving him onward, forward. And she could feel it from him, swelling larger like a balloon: excitement.

Let out of his cage, he was running her down.

The fear drove her forward.

The trees flew past. The cars. The bejeweled string of ocean glimmering under the dusky sun.

The ground swayed.

He’s too fast. Even with her head-start, he had covered the distance with a startling dexterity.

But Heather continued. She kept going. She did not know how not to.

The fixed, central point of the horizon danced before her as she destined to run toward it, desperate to jump into it – when her world swayed, and the limitless image of the sunset rotated – as she realized slowly, realized belatedly that it was her body falling, her body crashing through the warehouse entrance, with only the sound of the security panels groaning and the security panels slamming into the concrete behind her after the very moment she had dove under them, clearing them, with only an optimist’s inch to spare.

Heather rolled onto her back, laughing. A peculiar mania gripped her then. She had done it. She did it. She had nearly been guillotined by the security gate, but she didn’t care. She had outran the devil himself.

Her head lolled up.

And the room was as she remembered it: work bench, single overhead light, coffee cup, discarded clothes, and all of their requisite shadows. Except, she realized, mentally counting, there was one too many.

No

Heather’s head swiveled.

He was standing in front of the double doors, the iron security panels absorbing all sound; all life. He looked like a stolid tyrant standing giant before an iron balustrade. It was just the two of them, entombed.

Heather flung herself backward. She crashed into the far wall. Disoriented, terrified, she landed ugly on the floor

“Track,” he parroted back. “You forget, I’m a fast motherfucker, too.”

End Part I

Author’s Note:

Graphic, vivid prey perspective. This is a preview for the size-kink you can expect from this story. This is the darker, un-cuddly side of M/F. Power struggles, psychological torment, male dominance may be a trigger for some people. Exercise discretion.

Heather

Heather woke, rattled by the dream and interludes of memory.

She could remember.

And the realization that she could remember the long procession of events that had tumbled free from her mental triage, only for them to relentlessly expand, contract, and telescopically climax into the singular, vivid mental image of the void between his lips: felt ominous, somehow.

Animated by a new feeling, one she did not quite understand, but felt compelled to pursue - and, she knew, it was urgent that she do so - she looked up to discern a focal point. Strangely, she could not find one. Her eyes were unable to focus; it felt like a thin veil had been pulled across them. But, after several long moments, she realized she was staring at something alien but familiar. It was, she realized, a backdrop of orange and red leaves – no — her eyes narrowed and re-focused. She corrected herself. Those were not leaves. Those were flames.

Her eyes widened.

That was the fireplace. Their fireplace. The one endowed with so much memory, so much import, so much meaning from the canon of their relationship that she envisioned it as a proper noun capitalized – was - against all reason (because how did she get here? ) – emitting a stoic warmth – or, at least, she imagined that it was.

Because she could not feel the heat. Feeling curiously insensate, she chalked it up to narcotic numbness. But what she did not have an explanation for was its appearance: it was infinitely wide and infinitely panoramic.

She could make out its details, and understand it for what it was in a scientific, mathematical way. But there was something wrong about it. Something she did not understand.

And that something was sliding across her skin. It was wrong. All of it was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. And she was the thing that was wrong. She knew it; she felt it. All the wrongness flowed from her.

She was the common denominator. The oddity. Everything looked normal. But she was strange. And, she was not entirely convinced it was the narcotics. No; there was something else alien happening.

A burble of hysteria bubbled up in her. Maybe - maybe - it had all been a dream. Maybe, her dark liaison, her moody lover had never turned on her. Maybe, he had never thrown himself at her in a spasm of insanity, and, maybe he had never pulled her into his jaws, into that pulsing, dark void. Maybe none of that had happened; maybe he had never tried to eat her; maybe she had never discovered the alien word endoscopy with its great terrible alien resonance; maybe –

Heather’s brain clattered back against itself. How, then, did she know the word? And, why, then, was it making her feel deeply agitated?

Vexed, she stretched along the hard – what? A hard surface? Of what? Her skin jumped. Was it not in a bed she was reposing? How else did she slumber? How else did she dream?

And, suddenly, she was back to the first thought, the first interrogatory that had sent her down this mental corridor. Where am I?

She took inventory of her surroundings.
The ground beneath her: icy, cold. And the iciness was of a quality that suggested that it had once been wet. And why did the fireplace not penetrate this coldness? Why, instead of the warmth of the coverlet, or the emanation of the flames all she felt was coolness? How could that be? How was she not feeling the heat?

And why was her vision so blurry?

Heather shivered and propped herself up with one arm.

Oh my God.

Her eyes widened. She could see the edges of her reality. Why did her reality actually have a delineated boundary? She reached a hand out, and –

Jerked her hand back. She could touch it. There was a solidity to her visual field. And, from this angle, she could trace the contours of it. In a silent, mounting terror, she visually traced the extrusion. And her flesh prickled with a blooming sense of horror.

It felt like to her she was under a big-top tent; or domed cathedral. The extrusion overlapping her visual field - that she could touch, and feel - had a distinct…

She craned her head back to follow the edges. The edges suddenly tapered in such a way that the objects of the room presented themselves as though they were bubbled ever-outward, optically distinct like the vanishing point of the horizon viewed thtough a cylindrical lens.

Heather moved to her knees, crawling, inspecting. What had at first been presented to her as sheerness, and middle-space and a backwall that seemed to smudge her vision, rendering it slightly cloudy - upon closer inspection – was a wall of… Almost like it was, it –

The realization struck her down to her knees. The jolt of clairvoyance came together, full circle, with a terrible, chilling kind of alien logic that was so circular it could not be ignored:

Where am I? I’m in a…

Heather crawled herself through the sheerness, the elegant void, and crawling forward, and forward, on hands and knees, bent over, broken and ugly, crawling, because she couldn’t bring herself to stand, crawling, because she was unsure how to stand, crawling, until her forehead came to rest on the edge of her universe with a tink.

No. She pushed her forehead against the invisible barrier that, with each successive pant, with each successive shriek, with each successive sob, was slowly blooming into existence before her:

Her breath plumed, painting the invisible wall.

Condensation gathering on the edges of the water glass.

Like a butterfly in a jar, Heather ticked against the glass.

I’m… I’m in a cup. A glass… a water glass

She squealed her fingers down the sides.

Faceless, poreless, gripless, her prison was infinitely cold, infinitely sheer. She had nothing to hold, nothing to grip, nothing to grab. A spasm of hysteria went through her.

N-no no. She banged her fist against the walls.

A spinning, dizzying fear shot through her. She tumbled backwards.

She was in a vessel for food.

I’m tiny again. Oh my god, I’m small.

And: something large, something monstrous, something with shape and density was rising up from the ground, flesh-toned, from beyond her crystalline wall.

Heather flinched backward, trying to retreat but she bumped up against the convex walls of her prison.

Heather was drowning in fear. Her higher-brain recognized the flesh-tone, the color; but her tiny woodland brain was overwhelmed; overcome.

The massive giant had come to investigate the crystal prison.

Heather exploded into panic, battering her body against her detention. But she was unable to tear her gaze away from the flesh wall: the large, emerging entity, the continent that was so close to her visual field that it was a miasma of gigantism.

Heather made a strangled sound, clawing at the icy walls. Pinging away from the barricade, she fell to her knees, and like a forsaken fairy trapped in a snow globe – knowing at any moment the giant could upend her universe and shake it – she began to sob.

The extrusion, the flesh-toned geometry was a head: and its face was level with her inverted prison.

The walls of her universe darkened, clouding over like ash from a post-volcanic eruption. It took her a moment to understand, but, it was his hand: his hand was cupping the water glass. She stared at it in horror. He was so massive he could radically change her world. Each line in his palm like tectonic shift.

A sound peeled from her lips. She didn’t even think it had meaning. It had not even been a conscious decision; it simply was; it happened.

Heather did not know how not to fight, to persist, to survive. To keep moving. But this.

She shriveled down. Please

Segmentation of shapes rose up and edged the wall of her universe: his hands.

An eclipsing shadow cleaved closer, coming down from the heavens: his cranium.

The air above Heather’s head erupted. Her ears cried out. Her universe smashed over. A vacuum-tight pull wrenched the breath from her lungs. She flattened to the ground. A singular sensation whisked over her body:

air moving, air parting. Pressure normalizing.

He had removed the water glass.

Heather slowly peeled herself away from the ground. An open-palm slap rode her up high onto her knees. She lolled her head back.

And she looked at him.

He was emerging before her. And all of him, like the monolithic face of a statute, was staggeringly large. All of him - his features - were distorted by scale.

And like a devotee standing before the grandness of a cathedral, she could not see all of it; she could not hope to contain him in the steady, singular universe of her gaze. She could only meditate on one of his features at a time.

His eyes: large lakes of bioluminescence; green and blue that, at normal size, were so pale they could stop a clock.

His nose: a smooth, undisturbed length of bone that hovered above his top lip.

His mouth: - his mouth - once, a great source of her ruminations - was now a sink-hole framed by twin distinct topography.

That’s a hot mouth, she had remembered thinking once upon a time ago, when first they had met. And the compulsion had been so innocent, but, even then, Heather had remembered feeling this strange, incipient pull toward his mouth.

And for no small reason. His mouth was inherently attractive; sexual. The top lip crowned the bottom with a distinct cupid-bow shape. And his smile had a slow, stalking insistence to it; it was slightly off-center, which broke up what would otherwise be a very white and disarming grin. And that off-kilter smile, paired as it were with the deep-set cut of his brow, gave him the appearance he looked perpetually, pathologically disinterested, yet - somehow - still slyly amused.

If it was his pale eyes that commanded attention, it was his mouth that held it – it drew the eye to an even-featured face that was cupped by high, dramatic cheekbones. Normally, such features would have made a man look smooth, fresh, and earnest, ready to be the darling of the media circuit; instead, there was a touch more angularity to him - to his temples, his jaw, his chin - that made him look intriguingly feral.

Once upon a time, Heather had enjoyed his feral sex appeal; now, it was a token reminder that he was always but a heart-beat away from becoming a bestial juggernaut.

And she could - and could not - stop staring at his mouth.
She could see the shape of it in arresting detail: the tiniest of stitching in his lips; the wet gleam of saliva on the corners, and the hollow of his jaw that dimpled outward into an angular canyon.

Heather swallowed dryly. I’m small. I’m really small.

Small enough to be swallowed whole, her brain mocked, yet big enough to get caught in his throat.

And to it her eyes went: his neck was long columnar steel, and she could see the slow undulation of his Adam’s apple.

The thought of ending up in there turned her hair white.

And in that maddeningly knowing way of his, he arched forward, and she watched in perpetual fear as his tongue, in perpetual motion, appeared, sliding forward from his lips.

Heather recoiled.

And, compelled by an instinct she had only - previously - intellectually understood to exist, thrashed her body backwards.

She gaped up at him in frozen awe.

“What now, Heather Feather?”

Heather just stared. His voice was the same yet different. It was deep, drowning, a tangible emanation that she could disappear into; it rolled over her in a tangible blast of heat.

She stared into those inhumanly flawless eyes. Hadn’t they softened for her once? Was that love or hunger he had appraised her with?

This can’t be real.

Several long heart-beats came and went. The inertia gave her hope. Timidly, Heather stepped closer.

The table she stood on, oh-so familiar to her, extended forever. Where it had once held their drinks and gave her support when he sexed her from behind, it was now an endless forest’s worth of mahogany.

Her tiny gaze met his, and –

he licked his lips.

Heather snapped back in fear. The movement had been so vivid.

It had been a large, dusky pink tectonic plate, with tremendous character: engraved with fine texture, fine lines, the smallest coral reef of raised papillae and tastebuds, and large, corded vessels that looked vaguely phallic. A heavy hail of saliva rolled forward from its tip. Heather scrambled backward. Large droplets landed near her feet.

I’m dead. I’m so dead. I’m super dead.

She could hear it. The shlick of flesh moving against flesh. Even the sound held with it a sense of power. She, so small, felt flattened under the acoustic band of sound.

It took her a troubled second, a troubled infinity of seconds, to realize that the thrum in her feet, the heat skimming over her head was the product of him speaking.

Captive to the sound, she listened.

“You got that look,” he murmured.

“That look. I see it. Like you want to say somethin’. You all get it. That haunted, shell-like look. Like you’re ready to crack.” He held his hand out in a gesture of placation. “Go ahead, talk. Maybe you’ll have something more interesting to say. Fuck knows the others never did.”

Others. Heather felt despair clack inside her skull. There had been others. She was being lumped into a faceless group of others.

But, no, I’m not, she corrected him, mentally. I’m not part of those others. I’m the one - the one that got away. I’m the first. Your first. It’s special. That makes me special.

Use that, her brain pounded. Do it. Use it.

Chapter 7

In The Eye of The Beholder

Heather

Heather stiffened.
She looked up at the giant in disbelief. And for a brief second she forgot to be afraid. She forgot to waste away.

Her fear was so mounting that she forgot to feel it. But adjacent to that primitive tremble was a secondary thought, and it was quickly forming:
she had come full circle. This – all of this – had an eerie book-ended symmetry feel. It made her skin crawl.

It was as though the very endoscopy videos she had obsessed over, night after night, frame after fame, had prepared her for this. That everything prior to this (un)social encounter had been an unironic dress rehearsal for what now transpired; that it had all been building, building, building inexorably, toward this showdown. It was a sort of regressive logic, but it made sense, because, intellectually, she knew those endoscopy videos had been endowed with not just eroticism, but also by an unspoken, critical element that was infinitely more important:

Scale.

Those video captures, those stilted frames, those wide-angle shots into the crevices of the human body were only possible for its peeping-tom audience if everything was being projected, and seen, from the sight-line of a tiny (tiny) person.

And in the clutch of that sensory cacophony, bombarded by video after video, Heather had - if only subconsciously - armored herself against such a monstrosity of scale by deeply entrenching herself in it. She had become practiced at seeing the human body at this dimension because she had observed it by proxy, day after day.

For if he wasn’t human in function, he most certainly was in appearance. If he was scaled, or feathered, or devil-horned, it was only by great metaphor.

This though, was surreal. And, somehow, it was surreal enough that she had moments of lucidity. And in her lucidity the drug was curbed; it made still her small woodland brain.

She could still think.

Like this she grappled with her reality. True, no video could have properly interpreted the lush detail of what she was now seeing, but the spirit of it - the calculus of it - remained the same: she was a tiny woman, at a tiny scale, placed before a gigantic man that could thread her into the holes of his body like the convex lens of an endoscope camera – the very camera lens that had not-so ironically peered down, in brilliant refraction, into the rabbit hole: introducing her to a world that should have never manifested.

But here she was.

Naked, raw, she stood before him, hanging - as if by a cosmic thread - in a near-tangible pulsation of intimate grace they met eyes. It was the fantastical stasis of a moment; predator and prey sighting one another.

It was in this moment, she realized, it was the most honest he had ever been.

“I’m meeting you for the first time,” she said in a small voice.

And one of those large pale eyes rolled down, like a marble, to examine her. She could see the haze of the hunter, but there was a more sentient flicker about the pupil. She watched, in the black corona of it, her reflection: she was stunningly nude. And in this Escher painting, this impossible perspective, she saw herself as he would have: a lily-white Madonna with a halo of black hair. Beautifully reborn from within the corona of his eye.

She could almost understand it. She could almost feel it. It was a tip-of-the-tongue feeling; timeless. Could she understand him? Was there something to all of this that she could understand? Or was this the vanity of the ego?

But what she did not understand were his facial expressions: he was too large, but she could interpret his thoughts from the tiniest of muscular movements on the side of his face closest to her.

His eyes

And she wasn’t pining over his eyes like a lovestruck maiden; this felt religious, eternal.

She was taken by how beautiful his eyes actually were, certain in that moment that she had never appreciated colors - of any shade before - until at this moment, in her reduced size.

Had she always been so deaf, so blind to such an aching, beautiful universe? Was she always this unaware? Was she always this Godless? Was she looking upon the face of an Angel? A Devil?

Was he right? Was etymology the only natural barrier between angels and demons?

Heather took a deep, shuddery breath. Would he be able to hear her at this size? Somehow, she knew he would. “This is you. This… is… you.” It felt inadequate, even sophomoric, but she couldn’t stop the sudden upwelling of emotion. “I-I’ve never met you until now.”

A sadness whisked inside her, but it was immediately buoyed by a sense of incredulity. How could a secret of this magnitude be kept from her, for so long? How had she not met him - sharing hearth and home, secrets and flesh - until now?

She suddenly felt giddy, on the verge of hysteria. She actually grinned. It was the grin of a mad-woman, and that eye looked at her, intrigued. This, all of this was hiding plainly and plainly hiding and she had not known. To think, all this time, her ex-lover could transform into a God (for all intents and purposes). How could she - him - it - be so closeted from this possibility ?

Her eyes skimmed the protrusion that was his chin, and they drifted to the side suddenly preoccupied by a splash of color –

And orange and yellow leaves swirled around her feet, as fragrant and vibrant as the flames crackling from over his shoulders – and the image did not create one of a devil basking in an inferno, but rather, it created the vision of a man standing stolidly before an open hearth, a man standing by the romantic glow of the fire; a man that had been searching for something that had been so absent from his fingers –

so that they had closed over hers in the cool autumn air, and —

Who had said it?

And, Heather knew. And she knew it so well that it was embarrassing she had not noticed it sooner. She tumbled onto her backside in a hail of the giggles. Struck, all fear fell away. In a knot of hysteria, she flung her head back to look at him.

As a high-functioning addict, she shouted:

“I love you, too?!” She flung her arms wide in a theatrical arch, laughing into the high peaks of hysteria. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Needed to hear? Is that why you lost your ever-loving mind? This is all because I never said it back? Di - no…” Heather trailed off as a jolt of clarity went through her. “You… no, it’s not because I never said it back. It goes deeper than that…”

She looked at his large green eye; it was flat.

“Y-you thought I didn’t love you back then? Seriously, Danny? Like, seriously? I did, I absolutely did. It’s just hard saying it back when it’s the first time, you know? I needed fucking time. And oh my god I can’t believe we’re having this conversation when I’m, like, three inches tall and you’re standing in front of me like half a moving solar system. Shit.”

She interpreted the contractile movement in his eye to be involuntary shock.

She folded her arms. “You can’t deal with your own shit, can you? Was it neat and tidy trying to get rid of me? Toss me out like morning trash? Was that what you had planned?”

The tongue licked the large bottom lip whose shadow canopied her head. (Heather cantered backwards instinctively) in a gesture she knew, at normal scale, to mean he was thinking.

“Can you control it?” She blurted.

An eyebrow sloped down over that stunning pale eye. She intuited it to mean he was prompting her for clarification.

Heather could feel herself almost lost in the radiant paleness of his eye. “I-I think it’s cuz I’m still kinda high right now that I’m holding my shit together, because you’re huge. But, can you control it? The… the… behavior; like… that lizard brain of yours… you have to on some level, cuz I’ve seen you doin’ life pretty normally… I’ve seen you at social gatherings; your company…” She suddenly trailed off: “With me.”

He said nothing, because he knew - she knew - they both knew - that she knew the answer to the question.

Heather gave him a cross look (or at least attempted to project herself toward that green eye). “That’s what makes it ugly, Danny. You can control it. But you didn’t, not with me.”

The entire side of his face nearest to her was inert. Even that large pale eye did not evince movement.

It was, she knew, the expression he wore that, were she at normal size, would be a carefully-composed poker face.

Good, her brain rallied, Get him to see me, really see me. Make him see me as a person… make him actually fucking see me.

And a more-quiet realization joined her thoughts: If can bust through that strong prey-dive, I might be able to actually fucking live through this.

And if she did? If she were to survive? What unholy trauma, what fall-out would she face from this?

But she had not the luxury to meditate on this. Heather had to survive. This she knew. And she knew it well because she was - always - a survivor. Through sheer will alone Heather pushed back. A woman made weapon, a weapon made of woman, she sought to slay Goliath with only her wit, and her moxie.

“And yanno what makes it even more ugly? You didn’t come clean about any of this. None of it. You were gonna toss me away. And you know why that’s so ugly?”

The eye had intent now, it was examining her. This meant it saw her as more than just a woman-shaped thing.

He’s listening, she said to herself.

“Because you decided for me.”

And, his black pupil - so-fixedly trained on her - expanded violently; contracted.

She had made her master stroke. She had driven him back - however imperceptibly - with a verbal bludgeoning. She had found grace because she had lain at his feet the most terrifying thing of all:

Possibility.

Once upon a time, Heather had lain awake in her bed late at night, counting the clicks of her eyelids as she had ruminated over her fate. She had attempted to piece apart his psychology like anatomical dissection: obsessing over how he had attempted to consume her, she thought, would give her critical insight. She had considered that the possibility existed that his attempt to eat her had been nothing but a perfunctory act: a rote contraction of movement that had barely, yawningly, stretched beyond other more base instincts.

But, no. That had felt incongruent, that had felt too simple. (Danny was anything but simple).

And she had chastised herself, berated herself over it for caring so damn much.

But it mattered. And she knew it mattered because she had to understand the genesis of his desire. To know it, was to control it. She had wondered if it was a limbic compulsion that had burst forth from his animal-brain. And if so, then she was nothing more than gristle off the bone for him; an inducement of taste and sensation and could wield no power from her position.

But, instead, if it was something more, something more than just base desire, if it was something more complex, something expansive, hoping as she did then, just as she did now –

The giant’s head withdrew –

then, she had a chance.

Then, she had an avenue through which she could manipulate him.

Because, she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that complexity made it dangerous. Complexity made everything dangerous. And danger could be weaponized.

Heather lolled her head back to observe him. She interpreted this new distance to mean he was now sitting (no longer leaning forward) at the table, and with the increased space between them her eyes could pan, with more ease, over his face.

In a blunted, but euphoric ripple of narcotic-sedation she stared up at her giant captor in peaking awe: he was stunning. His size was commanding; his presence yawning and infinite; his face deceptively, timelessly handsome.

And on that face, a story was playing out.

He had the keen look of a bored immortal that had just been roused to sudden wakefulness. His little worshiper – a woman that had been claimed by him, shaped by him, destroyed by him the moment she was worthy of his attention – was standing at the mouth of his cave, tip-toeing closer to get a glimpse of his leathered wings.

He saw her as a plaything to be contained. A curiosity to be tormented. He was a child-god that would pop her in his mouth for no other reason than he could –

But Heather’s be-deviled God was full of caprice, and she had said something that stirred him. She had done something that interested him.

The giant tilted his head to the side in a curiously-feral gesture.

“This is different.”

Heather could laugh-scream. He was speaking. And it wasn’t until this very (strained) moment did she realize that it had been some time since he last spoke.

But Heather was no body’s fool; she knew she wasn’t yet out of the woods.

Heather eyed him warily. “Different how?”

He made a languid movement; stopped. “I can almost forget.”

“Forget what?”

His voice deepened. “That we’re acting out millions of years of predator-prey evolution. I can almost - almost forget that you’re prey.”

Heather felt herself falter. Had she gotten nowhere with this obstinate asshole?

“No,” she lowed. “I’m not. I’m not prey.”

He gave her a patently amused look. “Bold claim coming from someone that’s stared down my fucking gullet.”

Heather twitched; his eye caught it with a preternatural flick.

He’s… no… he’s testing me… don’t, don’t give in. This is do or die, Heather. Don’t show him your fucking belly. Don’t freak out. Do it later, you have plenty of time to freak out later.

“No,” Heather pronounced. “Prey is a mindset. I’m not, and never will be, prey.”

She met him pupil-for-pupil; stroke for stroke; gaze for gaze. She held it; commanded it.

Bend, you motherfucker, fucking bend

His eyes held her, unmoving. Pale and alien.

Heather’s heart pounded.

He was unreadable.

And there was a sudden flicker of interest across his face.
His voice was a silky utterance. “No…”

Heather stiffened toward him.

Bend, you motherfucker, bend

And, as though at the receiving end of her telepathic urging: “I think… you may be onto somethin’ here…”

Heather looked at him, faltered again.
Something about his manner made her inch back.

Suddenly, his pupils widening, drinking her in: “I think you’re right. I think… you’re more than that. You’re a whole new… concept. A concept I need to,” he interjected a pleased, aroused sound.
“Play with more.”

Chapter 8

Eat Me, Too

Heather

Heather felt herself laugh as though she was in a long tunnel, as though she was far away. Light, and lighter. Weightless. Like she was floating. Like she was high and mighty.

Like she was winning.

But, when she looked up —

Something had turned, something had changed, and she couldn’t tell if it was in her favor. Now, the giant man looked less like a protrusion of parts and – suddenly – more like “her” Danny: slowly emerging, slowly familiar. And she didn’t like it. And the tone he spoke with, she didn’t like that either. To play with her — she twisted her lip between her teeth. It was a curious choice of words.

She was hedging the quantum of her life against his amusement. But what, exactly, did that entail? She reached out a hand toward him, seeking connection; stopped. It was like trying to touch a mountain on the horizon. Heather could sense the panorama developing around them.

He: hovering above her, faintly amused, ready to reach down with giant fingers to make mischief with her tiny body. Her: small and trembling, wrapped in his predatory inertia, kneeling on the table. And that’s what made it uncomfortable, she realized. It suddenly looked too much like him. The familiarity was overriding and overcoming her mental sequestration so that she felt a scalding intimacy. She almost felt a peculiar second-hand embarrassment knowing what he wanted to do, having seen the approximation of it in the catalogue of videos she watched. But, this was no video. This was no abstraction. This was happening.

She couldn’t even pity him over it, couldn’t even dispense a symbolic there-there pat to his head to soothe the frustration of an overly-active imagination; not when he made it real.

Heather’s teeth clattered together as she repeated the taunt in her mind. Play.

Would she slip inside him and disappear?
He was cavernous. Her eyes tracked down his face, hovering over his features: the large, powerful jaw; the keyhole of his lips; the long columnar neck; the top of his chest —

He went on forever.

Or would he knot himself around her in a slaughter-hug?

Suddenly, it didn’t feel like she’d plink harmlessly off his teeth to retreat soundlessly into the pit of him. That felt too simple. Too expedient.

Because she knew, only as a madwoman could, that he wouldn’t want her to flit into him like a whisper. He wanted to take her with a roar. This wouldn’t be a case of: open slot, insert.

From his body language she knew this wasn’t transactional.

There was an erotic softness etched around the lines of his mouth.

To it she looked, then at the planes of his face.

Under the hollows of his cheekbones was a visible impression of his jaw anatomy: she could see masseter muscles.
The dense, powerful chewing muscles. On him, they were over-developed, and they flexed even in the stillness. Once, they had been twin advertisements of his masculinity; now, they were twin reminders of insidious purpose. They were bands of muscle that commanded a snarl of teeth. Mastication.

It was, her brain chirruped, only a few letters off masturbation.

And that’s what’s going to happen to me. Heather realized. That’s what this is. This is… this is a form of mental masturbation.

Heather tumbled the thought in her brain. It was strangely on-brand for him.
His proclivities, like the rest of him, went staggeringly deep. How involved was this, exactly? She knew from watching those endoscopy videos that the fetish was as convex as the lens that traversed the multitude of humans —

Human. Her brain snagged on the word.

Was his body human? She had seen some skilled practitioners perform impressive gymnastics with the endoscope instrument, expressing elevated motility and control. But they were human. And, she realized, if mere humans could do what she had seen…

He’s dark. But she had always known that, hadn’t she? In her previous life, she had turned a blind-eye to it because it had inconvenienced her. But, something like this, it never remained hidden, did it? Or, at least, not for long. It had a funny way of presenting itself. In conversation, in lewd humor, in —

“You were telling me all along weren’t you,” Heather remarked sadly.

What had first been a metaphor, now morphed into blood, bone, and predatory inertia. Because something as ugly as this could not contain itself. Eventually it would have to rouse; to surface; to stretch its tendons and hunt.

Heather wished that it was something as simple as that: a dark beast coming to roost; stalking her; hunting her, ingesting her in rote, clinical obligation. Not this. Not this man-beast that fantasized about slowly, calculably torturing her while extracting sadistic pleasure from every joint, every dimple in her body.

How bad was it? The compulsion?

You know, Heather’s brain mocked. You know damn well what he wants to do to you. Danny took everything to its extreme. He had to take everything to its extreme; to its inner tendon; shaving it close to the bone. He liked pleasure; he liked pain; he liked hurt. And if his limbic system was a dizzying ouroboros of pleasure — it would be her head in his jaws.

And he’d shave that close to the bone, too.

“Play with me,” she repeated hollowly. “You want… to - to play with me.”

Now what Heather-Feather. You bought some time but at what cost?

If she was winning, it was with regret; a strange oxidized regret that began flaking away. Her survival was slowly, like a wounded rail-car, clicking forward. She could almost count the seconds as they screeched audibly at rusted cross-beams, her brain clanking to a body-jostling halt. She was living on borrowed time, dangling over the precipice. But what lay in wait for her at the bottom of the plunge?

Him. She realized.

He would be waiting. His jaws open.

Because there was nothing after; nothing beyond this.

She was the woman that would never be; the woman that never was. No trace of her existence would be left behind. Not a whimper of her. She had no car, no phone. Her entire existence contracted down to the upended water glass, the infinite forest’s worth of mahogany, and the giant man before her.

Unlike her beloved fables of beasts and maidens, this was not a three-part act. There had been a beginning, certainly, a meandering middle, and now, this. But her conclusion, her end wouldn’t have catharsis. There would be no denouement. Her fingers clenched reflexively. She was lost in this singular wrinkle of existence. She had no phone. She had no…

A terrible, aching sadness whisked inside her. How would she ever walk the million miles necessary to… How could she… How

She looked down at her tiny, tiny hands. Am I stuck like this?

No. Later. Freak out, later.

“Hey,” she breathed, “I need to… you need to… you need to put me back to normal.”

“You look normal to me.”

And just like anything important, he had answered: but sideways, not directly, not forthrightly. Which meant, Heather realized, either he couldn’t control her size, or —

And if he could?

Oh God. The thought of him being able to control it, made liquid of her bones, because that meant he was a self-contained weapon. He could control her body at his whim.

I don’t want him to have that kind of power, Heather strained. Please, God, don’t let this hell-spawn have that kind of power.

Heather swallowed the lump in her throat. She had to believe that she could return to normal. She had to. She had once before, why not again?

Because it had never been this long.
Doubt crept along her spine. Small, he had made her once before; but it had been fleeting. This, felt like an eternity.

"In fact -

He was speaking. Heather looked up.

“You’re the way you should be.”

The anger that ticked inside her, surprised even her; there had been something so demeaning about that taunt that Heather couldn’t help but feel absurdly offended by it.

“The way I should be?” Heather returned, but this time with more color, more conviction. It rankled her, being told the type of woman she should be, three inches or no. She wasn’t daddy’s perfect little virgin, that was clear, and she certainly wasn’t at her Catholic Best when she was with Danny, which was a given, but God did she ever come alive when they crossed words, just as they did now. She wasn’t a fucking doll, not his, not now, not ever. And despite everything that was happening, everything that was poised to happen, she found herself absurdly angry; in fact, she felt the entire situation to be absurd. And she was just about done with it. All of it.

And here she held her breath, her head swimming with a strange suicidal urge to clapback —

— and thankfully this had the effect of creating a large, dramatic pause rather than an apprehensive stall-out, because he was fixed on her, watching, when she blurted: “You know what. Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I’m tired. I’m sick and tired and exhausted and, just — fine. I get it. You want to eat me? Do it. I’d rather fucking die than be told what to do, or what I’m supposed to be.”

“You would,” he remarked. “You absolutely fucking would. You’d rather die than be controlled.”

She slung back with a dismissive, yet pointed: “I get it. I’m hot, I’d eat me, too.”

Danny rocked back on his heels.

She raised an arch eyebrow up at him. “It’s a sex thing, Danny. It’s always a sex thing. I’m not stupid. I’m not gonna pretend to have figured it out, but, yeah, it’s like they say: what you repress, you end up expressing sideways. And I can’t think of anything more sideways than trying to eat your fucking girlfriend.”

“Ah, I see. I’m repressed,” he responded dryly.

“You know me,” she repeated churlishly. “I’d rather die than have you control me.”

“Oh, but how can I resist,” he responded in a low, intimate voice.

And Heather had not the luxury to meditate over this further, when something advanced. The shadow of it stole the words from her tongue.

It was a shape that was familiar to her, that she understood, just as it moved closer, in an eye-blink of movement to be —

his finger —

as it curled around her waist.

Heather froze.

This had been the critical element, the missing piece, the one discordant note lilting through this entire exchange that had hung on the beats: this is what had made it feel entirely too surreal, this is what had made it feel like a dream, so when he finally breached the invisible wall between them - reaching through time and space - did Heather feel the colossal piece of what was missing by its absence suddenly being scrubbed away: touch.

He was touching her.
He was joining their worlds.
Her entire existence, her entire being contracted down to this breathless moment, this wrinkle in time in which nothing else existed except for his finger around her tiny, naked waist.

It was a peculiar reflex, but she found her tiny, tiny hands lifting to touch his. Her small fingers, like delicate petals, overlaid his gigantic one. It was like an Escher painting, and in this impossible perspective, she saw her tiny fingers overlaid on his, like concentric shapes.

There was something poetic about it. And she could appreciate how romantic it was, if it were not for the fact that a most-sobering thought entered her rational brain: his barbaric finger could crush her.

He was so much bigger than her. A single contraction of muscle could crumple her body. But, instead of fretting over the possibility of his violence, she studied the shape of his finger from the bed of his nail, down to the rise of his knuckle with the raptness of someone heavily medicated.

And in his giant eyes, his pupils enlarged, then retracted, the pale irises glinting; it was the gleam of a wild animal caught at dusk.

“This is such a turn-on,” he remarked quietly. “You know what I can do. What I want to do. And cuz I know all of that is rattling around inside your head, it makes it even more hot.”

His finger, around her perfectly small waist, curled down to create a perfect apostrophe on top of her vulva.

The physicality of it was stunning. A small sound escaped from her, but she observed an opening in their primitive dance.

“This is why,” Heather started in a small voice, “This is why you can’t kill me. Because, if you do, if-if you do, you don’t just snuff me out, but you snuff out what’s in my head, too.”

The slow, indulgent movement over her vulva stopped.

The maiden overlaid her tiny, tiny fingers on the beast’s large claw in a gentle perversion of an olive branch. "I… I’m going to be forever changed by this, Danny. I can’t… I can’t go back to normal. I saw what you can do, I saw what’s out there. They say, if you’re gonna sup with the devil, you need a long spoon, but they don’t tell you what to do when the devil comes to sup on you. There’s no off-ramp for that; there’s no exit strategy. How the fuck do I return to normal after this, Danny? And how do you get rid of someone that’s… that’s… seen the darkest side of you and —

“Don’t,” he snarled. And the acoustics of his voice expanded, developing into something Heather would characterize as an ‘undervoice’ - a faint, secondary voice that overlapped his primary one with a metallic rasp. It was inhuman.

But it was him. That was the demon that was lurking. Heather gripped his finger in an autonomic spasm.

“Don’t,” he continued in that binaural voice, “pretend that you’re okay with any of this.”

A snarl, vicious like a wolf’s carved into the lips that canopied her shadow. Heather’s head ticked down; the sight of all that anatomy moving was briefly - but powerfully - nauseating. An undulation through the jaw muscles, an expansion of the keyhole in his lips to flash a sickle of teeth: these were the gears of war that he brought to this battle.

But she brought something more.

Honesty. And she would bear it like a blade.

“I’M NOT,” she shot back heatedly. “I’m not okay with any of this. I’m definitely fucking not. I’m so not okay with this, that I’m the not-okayest okayest of this I could possibly be. I’m not even going to pretend to be okay with any of this. I don’t know if I ever will be… but somehow I’m not surprised? Somehow this feels like you. Even now, this is… this is you. This is totally something you’d do. I’m just surprised you haven’t popped a cup over me sooner.”

Danny looked down at her, frozen.
 
Off his look: “I talk a lot.”
 
He snorted a wild, uncontrollable laugh. “I’ll admit, I’ve thought about it.” He remarked coyly. His voice was normal again.

“But, seriously.” She continued with sudden graveness. “Three hundred and sixty — fuck, however long it is — it took me three hundred and sixty-something days to - to finally talk about any of this. But… but here I am.” And she folded down on herself, frowning. “I get you,” she spat. “I do. I ran from you all this time, all to be back at the start. I went over last year in my head a thousand times. I remember everything. Everything. And I still - I - it wasn’t what you did that made me so… so fucking upset. I’m upset because you did everything you did and then you pretended nothing happened; like it was no big deal. But I know that isn’t true. And you know that isn’t true. What happened - what happened between us was a Big Fucking Deal. And it was a Big Fucking Deal 'cuz otherwise you wouldn’t be tripping over your dick to get to me a whole fucking year later. And, here I am, in front of you, three fucking inches tall and there’s a part of you that’s still terrified of me.”

For a long, trembling moment there was nothing, just the sharp lines of his face set against a backdrop of domesticity. Then,
 
“No,” he mouthed.
 
And in a surge of anger, he pushed himself back from the table. “No, no, no,” he repeated. He made a mindless circuit around the furniture, then slammed his hand down on the wooden surface. The glass bounced off the table, shattering. The tiny woman sent to her knees.

Heather had, with an optimist’s inch, avoided the violence. She looked at the carnage of glass, then back up at the seething giant.

She almost couldn’t speak. It had felt like the world was ending when the glass had imploded. And there was a wildness, a frenetic nature to her stalking giant that she didn’t like. He looked like a bright-eyed, hackled wolf.

And the metaphor, against her better judgment, continued: in a languid movement he surged over the table, his sleek profile advancing until the blade of his nose touched her. He had turned over her gentle burrow in the earth, and - saliva pooling in his mouth - was scenting her. Heather screamed out.

The smooth tip of his nose skimmed over her scalp, her shoulder. The sensation was reported to her as a soft band of pressure. Heather held her breath in stupefied confusion. His nose hung ponderously low, and his breath washed palpably over her. She snapped her head away from the two black orbital holes, convinced if she started at them too long she’d be snorted up into his cranium. Soundlessly, she felt herself pulled into a humified slipstream. It was a warm pulling; pushing; pulling; pushing that cycled with the syncopation of a heartbeat.

He panted over her. With a creak, his lips parted. The inhale from his nares prickled her skin; the out-breath from his mouth blasted her.

He withdrew (but only by half), but not before giving her a small regretful little nuzzle. Heather looked at him, stunned.

“Shame you’re so high, Heather Feather. Otherwise I’d show you.”

This close, she felt every syllable of his humid breath.

“So, this is it then? Is this my new normal?” She retorted moodily.

“Something like that,” he murmured.

"Make it good, then, since you know you can only do it —

Danny

Once.

He could only have her once.
 
The word pounded in his brain. His neck. It had a power, a shape all its own.

Once.

But what if he could have her each time? And each time he’d slowly bring her closer to the brink? The wait would be torturous. But the release. Ah God, the release. (It would be worth it). To deny himself over and over again, until he could finally turn on her in one stunning, violent moment? He’d see it on her face, in her eyes. It’d be so tragic. It’d be so beautiful.
 
Bedding, wedding, and slaying the lamb.

He looked at her, suddenly aware of her size. And, oh, how aware of it he was.
 
So tiny. So very, very tiny. His vagus nerve twitched.
 
I could swallow you so easily. But he didn’t want it easy. Not with his Kitten.

And he curled his fingers around her, tenderly pulling her into his palm. Gently, with the fingers of his other hand (and moving with the precision of someone that had done this many, many times before) he encircled her waist, like a giant tweezing the beautiful parts of a butterfly.
 
“What the fuck am I ever gonna do with you.” She was in perfect replication, down to her eyelashes. His vagus nerve twitched, again, at the vision of her.

And his thumb moved, gliding down her soft underbelly. Stroking up, stroking down. He held her eye-level, like a tiny glass figurine. It was like something out of the canon of the Greek fairytales he read as a child.
 
Lust held Pride in his hand and devoured her.

“You’re not wrong,” he murmured. “It would be a shame to get rid of the only lady-prey that’s been keeping my secrets.’” He was more talking to himself, his eyes skimming across her bare body. The anger had dissipated and it was replaced by the languishing, softening glow of lust. “Wouldn’t it. Heather Feather.”

It wasn’t a question.

Heather

Yet how easily he held her caused her mind to drift.
 
Heather held the golden urn in her arms. How had a woman, a tall beautiful creature of this world who had carried her forth, possibly fit into this tiny vessel? Once, she had been the one carried in the arms of this perfect and wholesome figure, but now how was she to react - only a child - as the one who cradled the dead remains of her mother?

Heather was a woman. Flesh and blood, heart and soul. Yet Danny held her easily, as though her entire self could be folded up into a receptacle. As though she could be deposited into the box of his obscene needs.

Was she willing to welcome them? All of them? Every single last one? He had given her a glimpse of what lay beyond. His black magic, his fetish, his compulsions be damned, his existence meant that he belonged to an intricate system, a constellation of possibilities that should have only been stamped on the inside pages of a dark fairytale.

And she wanted to be a part of that tale; not lost in its footnote.

It was just him: Danny, her intelligent handsome monster. They were so tragically and poetically perfect. Was it not the stories of Beauty falling for Beast that she had loved the most?
 
And if Beast had tried to devour Beauty?

She considered his question. Could she really harbor his secrets? Could she?
 
Heather could feel the unspoken letters of a threat hanging; building like a cloud of potential.

Could she allow him to bring countless women into his body? Likely even his bed just to make the act that much more sensational? What of her? Could she forgive him his sins? Worse: could she carry them? Enable them? Did it matter? Did it really? Should she shed any sympathy for those that weren’t clever enough to outwit or outsex her demon?

“I know, I know,” she said sadly, “You want to play with me. But… that’s the thing of it, isn’t it? That’s what you always do. You take. And you take, and you take, and you take. Why not, for once… let me give? Why not, for once, you let me give to you? Sure: you can have me. You can take from me, you can take me, just like you normally would. But that’s the same energy, that’s the same vibe. Why not let me try to give? I can try to give you space… I can try to give you understanding. I can try, maybe, one day to try and willingly…” She couldn’t even say it; it pained her. The thought of giving herself willingly to his jaws was overwhelming. She swallowed thickly, and continued in what she hoped was an appeal to his more human side: “We can try.”

Danny

And he had taken to this new turn of events with an unexpected relief, and a new-found feeling of contentment. He liked holding her in his hand; it felt overwhelmingly precious to him.
 
He looked at her, this tiny figurine in his upended palm, not solely as something to be devoured, but he looked at her as something more.

She was no longer just a collection of attractive womanly parts.

Danny canted his head to the side and listened. He felt like a wolf that had scented something indeterminable in the wind. But he heard her; he listened. He always listened whenever Heather spoke, because whether it was a coarse rebuke, or an elegant rejoinder, Heather was always interesting.

She’d give herself to him willingly?

He felt – he felt overwhelmed. He deflected with a harsh: “I don’t need your consent.”

“No,” he heard her say in a small, simple voice. “But that’s the one thing you can’t take. Nobody can. H-have you tried consensually…” Her voice petered out, then hardened: “No. You haven’t. That’s obvious.”

She wasn’t wrong.

He licked his lips; stretched his jaw in a quick frenetic pulse of excitement.

It would - as she said - be a different energy. It would be a vibe that was entirely impossible to recreate. It was like she had taken a stick to his mind and bashed it open like a beehive.

“Why,” was all he croaked. And his voice was raw and unvarnished.

Heather

“Because, I’d rather crawl into your jaws, than the jaws of domesticity.”

(Danny looked at her in open astonishment).

“I don’t want normal, Danny. I never did. I don’t want average. There’s gotta be more to life than nine-to-five, and-and watching the dishes pile in the sink… I… don’t want any of that. I,” her throat tightened, she felt overwhelmed, “You know me. You know how I love those Beauty and the Beast stories where the girl gets her beast. Well, maybe, deep down Beauty did want to be eaten. Maybe, maybe not. And, maybe, deep down Beast wanted to eat Beauty. Who knows. All I know is- is that if I have to go back to the flower shop, and p-pay taxes, and scroll social media, and pretend that none of this happened, none of this was real, if I have to walk around like a fucking ghost talking about the fucking Kardashians, pretending that none of this happened — I’d go fucking crazy. I’d go absolutely bonkers. I’d kill you, or myself. I’d rather fucking die and have that knowledge die with me than try and go back to normal…”

She took a deep breath. “Don’t you want to be seen?”

He looked at her pensively. Then, offered a:

“Bad news, Kitten.”

He was calling her Kitten. She looked up.

“I still pay taxes.”

She snorted a wild, uncontrollable laugh. “Ah God, not even demons can dodge the IRS.” (He barked a laugh).

“But,” she continued in a sad, strained voice, the hysterics of her laughter carrying her through: “I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. I’m tired of pretending I’m strong right now. I’m not. I’m weak. And I’m scared. And I have to pee, and I just want… I just want us to be okay. We can s-start over, or whatever, or just… pretend none of this happened, or see what can, or just… I’m just,” she began to cry silently, “I’m sorry, for both of us. I’m sorry for every damn thing. I’m sorry you’re locked into this damn addiction like I’m locked into mine, and I just…” fault lines began to open in her face, “Let me be your… your lady-prey. Let’s figure this out together. Let’s just…” Heather’s face sank into her hands. She blotted out the world, she blotted out the demon. She didn’t care. She just wanted to curl up and cry. She made a sad sound from between her laced fingers, “Eat me, or don’t. I don’t care anymore. I just need to… There’s a lot to unpack here, and there’s a lot… and I’m just,” she looked at him with wounded eyes.

His large hand brushed against her.

And there was a contraction, a movement, a sensation of lift.
Which compelled her to open her eyes so that she could see — and what she saw startled her enough that she tumbled off the table –
– normal-sized –
but before she could impact with the ground, his arm went around her waist.

There was shock: and she was not sure from which body it was generated.
She looked at his arm looped around her waist – just as it was, a year ago – used as a barricade to protect her from her fall, and she had not the luxury to contemplate if it was affection that had motivated him – or instinct – because her face was falling, her face was crumpling, and she buried it into his chest, thinking about what she had negotiated with the devil.

Oh God, what did I get myself into.

And she wept.

(This doctrinal program has been kicking my ass. But, I am through the worst of it now, and my work load will be reduced starting next month. I will be able to contribute again)

Chapter 8

Eat Me, Too

Heather

Heather felt herself laugh as though she was in a long tunnel, as though she was far away. Light, and lighter. Weightless. Like she was floating. Like she was high and mighty.

Like she was winning.

But, when she looked up —

Something had turned, something had changed, and she couldn’t tell if it was in her favor. Now, the giant man looked less like a protrusion of parts and – suddenly – more like “her” Danny: slowly emerging, slowly familiar. And she didn’t like it. And the tone he spoke with, she didn’t like that either. To play with her — she twisted her lip between her teeth. It was a curious choice of words.

She was hedging the quantum of her life against his amusement. But what, exactly, did that entail? She reached out a hand toward him, seeking connection; stopped. It was like trying to touch a mountain on the horizon. Heather could sense the panorama developing around them.

He: hovering above her, faintly amused, ready to reach down with giant fingers to make mischief with her tiny body. Her: small and trembling, wrapped in his predatory inertia, kneeling on the table. And that’s what made it uncomfortable, she realized. It suddenly looked too much like him. The familiarity was overriding and overcoming her mental sequestration so that she felt a scalding intimacy. She almost felt a peculiar second-hand embarrassment knowing what he wanted to do, having seen the approximation of it in the catalogue of videos she watched. But, this was no video. This was no abstraction. This was happening.

She couldn’t even pity him over it, couldn’t even dispense a symbolic there-there pat to his head to soothe the frustration of an overly-active imagination; not when he made it real.

Heather’s teeth clattered together as she repeated the taunt in her mind. Play.

Would she slip inside him and disappear?
He was cavernous. Her eyes tracked down his face, hovering over his features: the large, powerful jaw; the keyhole of his lips; the long columnar neck; the top of his chest —

He went on forever.

Or would he knot himself around her in a slaughter-hug?

Suddenly, it didn’t feel like she’d plink harmlessly off his teeth to retreat soundlessly into the pit of him. That felt too simple. Too expedient.

Because she knew, only as a madwoman could, that he wouldn’t want her to flit into him like a whisper. He wanted to take her with a roar. This wouldn’t be a case of: open slot, insert.

From his body language she knew this wasn’t transactional.

There was an erotic softness etched around the lines of his mouth.

To it she looked, then at the planes of his face.

Under the hollows of his cheekbones was a visible impression of his jaw anatomy: she could see masseter muscles.
The dense, powerful chewing muscles. On him, they were over-developed, and they flexed even in the stillness. Once, they had been twin advertisements of his masculinity; now, they were twin reminders of insidious purpose. They were bands of muscle that commanded a snarl of teeth. Mastication.

It was, her brain chirruped, only a few letters off masturbation.

And that’s what’s going to happen to me. Heather realized. That’s what this is. This is… this is a form of mental masturbation.

Heather tumbled the thought in her brain. It was strangely on-brand for him.
His proclivities, like the rest of him, went staggeringly deep. How involved was this, exactly? She knew from watching those endoscopy videos that the fetish was as convex as the lens that traversed the multitude of humans —

Human. Her brain snagged on the word.

Was his body human? She had seen some skilled practitioners perform impressive gymnastics with the endoscope instrument, expressing elevated motility and control. But they were human. And, she realized, if mere humans could do what she had seen…

He’s dark. But she had always known that, hadn’t she? In her previous life, she had turned a blind-eye to it because it had inconvenienced her. But, something like this, it never remained hidden, did it? Or, at least, not for long. It had a funny way of presenting itself. In conversation, in lewd humor, in —

“You were telling me all along weren’t you,” Heather remarked sadly.

What had first been a metaphor, now morphed into blood, bone, and predatory inertia. Because something as ugly as this could not contain itself. Eventually it would have to rouse; to surface; to stretch its tendons and hunt.

Heather wished that it was something as simple as that: a dark beast coming to roost; stalking her; hunting her, ingesting her in rote, clinical obligation. Not this. Not this man-beast that fantasized about slowly, calculably torturing her while extracting sadistic pleasure from every joint, every dimple in her body.

How bad was it? The compulsion?

You know, Heather’s brain mocked. You know damn well what he wants to do to you. Danny took everything to its extreme. He had to take everything to its extreme; to its inner tendon; shaving it close to the bone. He liked pleasure; he liked pain; he liked hurt. And if his limbic system was a dizzying ouroboros of pleasure — it would be her head in his jaws.

And he’d shave that close to the bone, too.

“Play with me,” she repeated hollowly. “You want… to - to play with me.”

Now what Heather-Feather. You bought some time but at what cost?

If she was winning, it was with regret; a strange oxidized regret that began flaking away. Her survival was slowly, like a wounded rail-car, clicking forward. She could almost count the seconds as they screeched audibly at rusted cross-beams, her brain clanking to a body-jostling halt. She was living on borrowed time, dangling over the precipice. But what lay in wait for her at the bottom of the plunge?

Him. She realized.

He would be waiting. His jaws open.

Because there was nothing after; nothing beyond this.

She was the woman that would never be; the woman that never was. No trace of her existence would be left behind. Not a whimper of her. She had no car, no phone. Her entire existence contracted down to the upended water glass, the infinite forest’s worth of mahogany, and the giant man before her.

Unlike her beloved fables of beasts and maidens, this was not a three-part act. There had been a beginning, certainly, a meandering middle, and now, this. But her conclusion, her end wouldn’t have catharsis. There would be no denouement. Her fingers clenched reflexively. She was lost in this singular wrinkle of existence. She had no phone. She had no…

A terrible, aching sadness whisked inside her. How would she ever walk the million miles necessary to… How could she… How

She looked down at her tiny, tiny hands. Am I stuck like this?

No. Later. Freak out, later.

“Hey,” she breathed, “I need to… you need to… you need to put me back to normal.”

“You look normal to me.”

And just like anything important, he had answered: but sideways, not directly, not forthrightly. Which meant, Heather realized, either he couldn’t control her size, or —

And if he could?

Oh God. The thought of him being able to control it, made liquid of her bones, because that meant he was a self-contained weapon. He could control her body at his whim.

I don’t want him to have that kind of power, Heather strained. Please, God, don’t let this hell-spawn have that kind of power.

Heather swallowed the lump in her throat. She had to believe that she could return to normal. She had to. She had once before, why not again?

Because it had never been this long.
Doubt crept along her spine. Small, he had made her once before; but it had been fleeting. This, felt like an eternity.

"In fact -

He was speaking. Heather looked up.

“You’re the way you should be.”

The anger that ticked inside her, surprised even her; there had been something so demeaning about that taunt that Heather couldn’t help but feel absurdly offended by it.

“The way I should be?” Heather returned, but this time with more color, more conviction. It rankled her, being told the type of woman she should be, three inches or no. She wasn’t daddy’s perfect little virgin, that was clear, and she certainly wasn’t at her Catholic Best when she was with Danny, which was a given, but God did she ever come alive when they crossed words, just as they did now. She wasn’t a fucking doll, not his, not now, not ever. And despite everything that was happening, everything that was poised to happen, she found herself absurdly angry; in fact, she felt the entire situation to be absurd. And she was just about done with it. All of it.

And here she held her breath, her head swimming with a strange suicidal urge to clapback —

— and thankfully this had the effect of creating a large, dramatic pause rather than an apprehensive stall-out, because he was fixed on her, watching, when she blurted: “You know what. Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I’m tired. I’m sick and tired and exhausted and, just — fine. I get it. You want to eat me? Do it. I’d rather fucking die than be told what to do, or what I’m supposed to be.”

“You would,” he remarked. “You absolutely fucking would. You’d rather die than be controlled.”

She slung back with a dismissive, yet pointed: “I get it. I’m hot, I’d eat me, too.”

Danny rocked back on his heels.

She raised an arch eyebrow up at him. “It’s a sex thing, Danny. It’s always a sex thing. I’m not stupid. I’m not gonna pretend to have figured it out, but, yeah, it’s like they say: what you repress, you end up expressing sideways. And I can’t think of anything more sideways than trying to eat your fucking girlfriend.”

“Ah, I see. I’m repressed,” he responded dryly.

“You know me,” she repeated churlishly. “I’d rather die than have you control me.”

“Oh, but how can I resist,” he responded in a low, intimate voice.

And Heather had not the luxury to meditate over this further, when something advanced. The shadow of it stole the words from her tongue.

It was a shape that was familiar to her, that she understood, just as it moved closer, in an eye-blink of movement to be —

his finger —

as it curled around her waist.

Heather froze.

This had been the critical element, the missing piece, the one discordant note lilting through this entire exchange that had hung on the beats: this is what had made it feel entirely too surreal, this is what had made it feel like a dream, so when he finally breached the invisible wall between them - reaching through time and space - did Heather feel the colossal piece of what was missing by its absence suddenly being scrubbed away: touch.

He was touching her.
He was joining their worlds.
Her entire existence, her entire being contracted down to this breathless moment, this wrinkle in time in which nothing else existed except for his finger around her tiny, naked waist.

It was a peculiar reflex, but she found her tiny, tiny hands lifting to touch his. Her small fingers, like delicate petals, overlaid his gigantic one. It was like an Escher painting, and in this impossible perspective, she saw her tiny fingers overlaid on his, like concentric shapes.

There was something poetic about it. And she could appreciate how romantic it was, if it were not for the fact that a most-sobering thought entered her rational brain: his barbaric finger could crush her.

He was so much bigger than her. A single contraction of muscle could crumple her body. But, instead of fretting over the possibility of his violence, she studied the shape of his finger from the bed of his nail, down to the rise of his knuckle with the raptness of someone heavily medicated.

And in his giant eyes, his pupils enlarged, then retracted, the pale irises glinting; it was the gleam of a wild animal caught at dusk.

“This is such a turn-on,” he remarked quietly. “You know what I can do. What I want to do. And cuz I know all of that is rattling around inside your head, it makes it even more hot.”

His finger, around her perfectly small waist, curled down to create a perfect apostrophe on top of her vulva.

The physicality of it was stunning. A small sound escaped from her, but she observed an opening in their primitive dance.

“This is why,” Heather started in a small voice, “This is why you can’t kill me. Because, if you do, if-if you do, you don’t just snuff me out, but you snuff out what’s in my head, too.”

The slow, indulgent movement over her vulva stopped.

The maiden overlaid her tiny, tiny fingers on the beast’s large claw in a gentle perversion of an olive branch. "I… I’m going to be forever changed by this, Danny. I can’t… I can’t go back to normal. I saw what you can do, I saw what’s out there. They say, if you’re gonna sup with the devil, you need a long spoon, but they don’t tell you what to do when the devil comes to sup on you. There’s no off-ramp for that; there’s no exit strategy. How the fuck do I return to normal after this, Danny? And how do you get rid of someone that’s… that’s… seen the darkest side of you and —

“Don’t,” he snarled. And the acoustics of his voice expanded, developing into something Heather would characterize as an ‘undervoice’ - a faint, secondary voice that overlapped his primary one with a metallic rasp. It was inhuman.

But it was him. That was the demon that was lurking. Heather gripped his finger in an autonomic spasm.

“Don’t,” he continued in that binaural voice, “pretend that you’re okay with any of this.”

A snarl, vicious like a wolf’s carved into the lips that canopied her shadow. Heather’s head ticked down; the sight of all that anatomy moving was briefly - but powerfully - nauseating. An undulation through the jaw muscles, an expansion of the keyhole in his lips to flash a sickle of teeth: these were the gears of war that he brought to this battle.

But she brought something more.

Honesty. And she would bear it like a blade.

“I’M NOT,” she shot back heatedly. “I’m not okay with any of this. I’m definitely fucking not. I’m so not okay with this, that I’m the not-okayest okayest of this I could possibly be. I’m not even going to pretend to be okay with any of this. I don’t know if I ever will be… but somehow I’m not surprised? Somehow this feels like you. Even now, this is… this is you. This is totally something you’d do. I’m just surprised you haven’t popped a cup over me sooner.”

Danny looked down at her, frozen.
 
Off his look: “I talk a lot.”
 
He snorted a wild, uncontrollable laugh. “I’ll admit, I’ve thought about it.” He remarked coyly. His voice was normal again.

“But, seriously.” She continued with sudden graveness. “Three hundred and sixty — fuck, however long it is — it took me three hundred and sixty-something days to - to finally talk about any of this. But… but here I am.” And she folded down on herself, frowning. “I get you,” she spat. “I do. I ran from you all this time, all to be back at the start. I went over last year in my head a thousand times. I remember everything. Everything. And I still - I - it wasn’t what you did that made me so… so fucking upset. I’m upset because you did everything you did and then you pretended nothing happened; like it was no big deal. But I know that isn’t true. And you know that isn’t true. What happened - what happened between us was a Big Fucking Deal. And it was a Big Fucking Deal 'cuz otherwise you wouldn’t be tripping over your dick to get to me a whole fucking year later. And, here I am, in front of you, three fucking inches tall and there’s a part of you that’s still terrified of me.”

For a long, trembling moment there was nothing, just the sharp lines of his face set against a backdrop of domesticity. Then,
 
“No,” he mouthed.
 
And in a surge of anger, he pushed himself back from the table. “No, no, no,” he repeated. He made a mindless circuit around the furniture, then slammed his hand down on the wooden surface. The glass bounced off the table, shattering. The tiny woman sent to her knees.

Heather had, with an optimist’s inch, avoided the violence. She looked at the carnage of glass, then back up at the seething giant.

She almost couldn’t speak. It had felt like the world was ending when the glass had imploded. And there was a wildness, a frenetic nature to her stalking giant that she didn’t like. He looked like a bright-eyed, hackled wolf.

And the metaphor, against her better judgment, continued: in a languid movement he surged over the table, his sleek profile advancing until the blade of his nose touched her. He had turned over her gentle burrow in the earth, and - saliva pooling in his mouth - was scenting her. Heather screamed out.

The smooth tip of his nose skimmed over her scalp, her shoulder. The sensation was reported to her as a soft band of pressure. Heather held her breath in stupefied confusion. His nose hung ponderously low, and his breath washed palpably over her. She snapped her head away from the two black orbital holes, convinced if she started at them too long she’d be snorted up into his cranium. Soundlessly, she felt herself pulled into a humified slipstream. It was a warm pulling; pushing; pulling; pushing that cycled with the syncopation of a heartbeat.

He panted over her. With a creak, his lips parted. The inhale from his nares prickled her skin; the out-breath from his mouth blasted her.

He withdrew (but only by half), but not before giving her a small regretful little nuzzle. Heather looked at him, stunned.

“Shame you’re so high, Heather Feather. Otherwise I’d show you.”

This close, she felt every syllable of his humid breath.

“So, this is it then? Is this my new normal?” She retorted moodily.

“Something like that,” he murmured.

"Make it good, then, since you know you can only do it —

Danny

Once.

He could only have her once.
 
The word pounded in his brain. His neck. It had a power, a shape all its own.

Once.

But what if he could have her each time? And each time he’d slowly bring her closer to the brink? The wait would be torturous. But the release. Ah God, the release. (It would be worth it). To deny himself over and over again, until he could finally turn on her in one stunning, violent moment? He’d see it on her face, in her eyes. It’d be so tragic. It’d be so beautiful.
 
Bedding, wedding, and slaying the lamb.

He looked at her, suddenly aware of her size. And, oh, how aware of it he was.
 
So tiny. So very, very tiny. His vagus nerve twitched.
 
I could swallow you so easily. But he didn’t want it easy. Not with his Kitten.

And he curled his fingers around her, tenderly pulling her into his palm. Gently, with the fingers of his other hand (and moving with the precision of someone that had done this many, many times before) he encircled her waist, like a giant tweezing the beautiful parts of a butterfly.
 
“What the fuck am I ever gonna do with you.” She was in perfect replication, down to her eyelashes. His vagus nerve twitched, again, at the vision of her.

And his thumb moved, gliding down her soft underbelly. Stroking up, stroking down. He held her eye-level, like a tiny glass figurine. It was like something out of the canon of the Greek fairytales he read as a child.
 
Lust held Pride in his hand and devoured her.

“You’re not wrong,” he murmured. “It would be a shame to get rid of the only lady-prey that’s been keeping my secrets.’” He was more talking to himself, his eyes skimming across her bare body. The anger had dissipated and it was replaced by the languishing, softening glow of lust. “Wouldn’t it. Heather Feather.”

It wasn’t a question.

Heather

Yet how easily he held her caused her mind to drift.
 
Heather held the golden urn in her arms. How had a woman, a tall beautiful creature of this world who had carried her forth, possibly fit into this tiny vessel? Once, she had been the one carried in the arms of this perfect and wholesome figure, but now how was she to react - only a child - as the one who cradled the dead remains of her mother?

Heather was a woman. Flesh and blood, heart and soul. Yet Danny held her easily, as though her entire self could be folded up into a receptacle. As though she could be deposited into the box of his obscene needs.

Was she willing to welcome them? All of them? Every single last one? He had given her a glimpse of what lay beyond. His black magic, his fetish, his compulsions be damned, his existence meant that he belonged to an intricate system, a constellation of possibilities that should have only been stamped on the inside pages of a dark fairytale.

And she wanted to be a part of that tale; not lost in its footnote.

It was just him: Danny, her intelligent handsome monster. They were so tragically and poetically perfect. Was it not the stories of Beauty falling for Beast that she had loved the most?
 
And if Beast had tried to devour Beauty?

She considered his question. Could she really harbor his secrets? Could she?
 
Heather could feel the unspoken letters of a threat hanging; building like a cloud of potential.

Could she allow him to bring countless women into his body? Likely even his bed just to make the act that much more sensational? What of her? Could she forgive him his sins? Worse: could she carry them? Enable them? Did it matter? Did it really? Should she shed any sympathy for those that weren’t clever enough to outwit or outsex her demon?

“I know, I know,” she said sadly, “You want to play with me. But… that’s the thing of it, isn’t it? That’s what you always do. You take. And you take, and you take, and you take. Why not, for once… let me give? Why not, for once, you let me give to you? Sure: you can have me. You can take from me, you can take me, just like you normally would. But that’s the same energy, that’s the same vibe. Why not let me try to give? I can try to give you space… I can try to give you understanding. I can try, maybe, one day to try and willingly…” She couldn’t even say it; it pained her. The thought of giving herself willingly to his jaws was overwhelming. She swallowed thickly, and continued in what she hoped was an appeal to his more human side: “We can try.”

Danny

And he had taken to this new turn of events with an unexpected relief, and a new-found feeling of contentment. He liked holding her in his hand; it felt overwhelmingly precious to him.
 
He looked at her, this tiny figurine in his upended palm, not solely as something to be devoured, but he looked at her as something more.

She was no longer just a collection of attractive womanly parts.

Danny canted his head to the side and listened. He felt like a wolf that had scented something indeterminable in the wind. But he heard her; he listened. He always listened whenever Heather spoke, because whether it was a coarse rebuke, or an elegant rejoinder, Heather was always interesting.

She’d give herself to him willingly?

He felt – he felt overwhelmed. He deflected with a harsh: “I don’t need your consent.”

“No,” he heard her say in a small, simple voice. “But that’s the one thing you can’t take. Nobody can. H-have you tried consensually…” Her voice petered out, then hardened: “No. You haven’t. That’s obvious.”

She wasn’t wrong.

He licked his lips; stretched his jaw in a quick frenetic pulse of excitement.

It would - as she said - be a different energy. It would be a vibe that was entirely impossible to recreate. It was like she had taken a stick to his mind and bashed it open like a beehive.

“Why,” was all he croaked. And his voice was raw and unvarnished.

Heather

“Because, I’d rather crawl into your jaws, than the jaws of domesticity.”

(Danny looked at her in open astonishment).

“I don’t want normal, Danny. I never did. I don’t want average. There’s gotta be more to life than nine-to-five, and-and watching the dishes pile in the sink… I… don’t want any of that. I,” her throat tightened, she felt overwhelmed, “You know me. You know how I love those Beauty and the Beast stories where the girl gets her beast. Well, maybe, deep down Beauty did want to be eaten. Maybe, maybe not. And, maybe, deep down Beast wanted to eat Beauty. Who knows. All I know is- is that if I have to go back to the flower shop, and p-pay taxes, and scroll social media, and pretend that none of this happened, none of this was real, if I have to walk around like a fucking ghost talking about the fucking Kardashians, pretending that none of this happened — I’d go fucking crazy. I’d go absolutely bonkers. I’d kill you, or myself. I’d rather fucking die and have that knowledge die with me than try and go back to normal…”

She took a deep breath. “Don’t you want to be seen?”

He looked at her pensively. Then, offered a:

“Bad news, Kitten.”

He was calling her Kitten. She looked up.

“I still pay taxes.”

She snorted a wild, uncontrollable laugh. “Ah God, not even demons can dodge the IRS.” (He barked a laugh).

“But,” she continued in a sad, strained voice, the hysterics of her laughter carrying her through: “I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. I’m tired of pretending I’m strong right now. I’m not. I’m weak. And I’m scared. And I have to pee, and I just want… I just want us to be okay. We can s-start over, or whatever, or just… pretend none of this happened, or see what can, or just… I’m just,” she began to cry silently, “I’m sorry, for both of us. I’m sorry for every damn thing. I’m sorry you’re locked into this damn addiction like I’m locked into mine, and I just…” fault lines began to open in her face, “Let me be your… your lady-prey. Let’s figure this out together. Let’s just…” Heather’s face sank into her hands. She blotted out the world, she blotted out the demon. She didn’t care. She just wanted to curl up and cry. She made a sad sound from between her laced fingers, “Eat me, or don’t. I don’t care anymore. I just need to… There’s a lot to unpack here, and there’s a lot… and I’m just,” she looked at him with wounded eyes.

His large hand brushed against her.

And there was a contraction, a movement, a sensation of lift.
Which compelled her to open her eyes so that she could see — and what she saw startled her enough that she tumbled off the table –
– normal-sized –
but before she could impact with the ground, his arm went around her waist.

There was shock: and she was not sure from which body it was generated.
She looked at his arm looped around her waist – just as it was, a year ago – used as a barricade to protect her from her fall, and she had not the luxury to contemplate if it was affection that had motivated him – or instinct – because her face was falling, her face was crumpling, and she buried it into his chest, thinking about what she had negotiated with the devil.

Oh God, what did I get myself into.

And she wept.

(My doctrinal program has been in full swing. Once I get normalized to the cadence, I’ll be able to post the upcoming chapters)

@tiny-ivy OOooo this looks neat. I’m a size-generalist, so I love all size-couple combinations

@tiny-ivy Ohhhh my~ I am so glad that you’re enjoying. Definitely more to come with these two

@kisupure YES. YOU nailed it! That’s the unironic ironic thing at play here. In an unabashedly strange way they’ve become equals despite their differences in size!

And it’s become almost something of ‘who really has the power here?’

Chapter 7

In The Eye of The Beholder

Heather

Heather stiffened.
She looked up at the giant in disbelief. And for a brief second she forgot to be afraid. She forgot to waste away.

Her fear was so mounting that she forgot to feel it. But adjacent to that primitive tremble was a secondary thought, and it was quickly forming:
she had come full circle. This – all of this – had an eerie book-ended symmetry feel. It made her skin crawl.

It was as though the very endoscopy videos she had obsessed over, night after night, frame after fame, had prepared her for this. That everything prior to this (un)social encounter had been an unironic dress rehearsal for what now transpired; that it had all been building, building, building inexorably, toward this showdown. It was a sort of regressive logic, but it made sense, because, intellectually, she knew those endoscopy videos had been endowed with not just eroticism, but also by an unspoken, critical element that was infinitely more important:

Scale.

Those video captures, those stilted frames, those wide-angle shots into the crevices of the human body were only possible for its peeping-tom audience if everything was being projected, and seen, from the sight-line of a tiny (tiny) person.

And in the clutch of that sensory cacophony, bombarded by video after video, Heather had - if only subconsciously - armored herself against such a monstrosity of scale by deeply entrenching herself in it. She had become practiced at seeing the human body at this dimension because she had observed it by proxy, day after day.

For if he wasn’t human in function, he most certainly was in appearance. If he was scaled, or feathered, or devil-horned, it was only by great metaphor.

This though, was surreal. And, somehow, it was surreal enough that she had moments of lucidity. And in her lucidity the drug was curbed; it made still her small woodland brain.

She could still think.

Like this she grappled with her reality. True, no video could have properly interpreted the lush detail of what she was now seeing, but the spirit of it - the calculus of it - remained the same: she was a tiny woman, at a tiny scale, placed before a gigantic man that could thread her into the holes of his body like the convex lens of an endoscope camera – the very camera lens that had not-so ironically peered down, in brilliant refraction, into the rabbit hole: introducing her to a world that should have never manifested.

But here she was.

Naked, raw, she stood before him, hanging - as if by a cosmic thread - in a near-tangible pulsation of intimate grace they met eyes. It was the fantastical stasis of a moment; predator and prey sighting one another.

It was in this moment, she realized, it was the most honest he had ever been.

“I’m meeting you for the first time,” she said in a small voice.

And one of those large pale eyes rolled down, like a marble, to examine her. She could see the haze of the hunter, but there was a more sentient flicker about the pupil. She watched, in the black corona of it, her reflection: she was stunningly nude. And in this Escher painting, this impossible perspective, she saw herself as he would have: a lily-white Madonna with a halo of black hair. Beautifully reborn from within the corona of his eye.

She could almost understand it. She could almost feel it. It was a tip-of-the-tongue feeling; timeless. Could she understand him? Was there something to all of this that she could understand? Or was this the vanity of the ego?

But what she did not understand were his facial expressions: he was too large, but she could interpret his thoughts from the tiniest of muscular movements on the side of his face closest to her.

His eyes

And she wasn’t pining over his eyes like a lovestruck maiden; this felt religious, eternal.

She was taken by how beautiful his eyes actually were, certain in that moment that she had never appreciated colors - of any shade before - until at this moment, in her reduced size.

Had she always been so deaf, so blind to such an aching, beautiful universe? Was she always this unaware? Was she always this Godless? Was she looking upon the face of an Angel? A Devil?

Was he right? Was etymology the only natural barrier between angels and demons?

Heather took a deep, shuddery breath. Would he be able to hear her at this size? Somehow, she knew he would. “This is you. This… is… you.” It felt inadequate, even sophomoric, but she couldn’t stop the sudden upwelling of emotion. “I-I’ve never met you until now.”

A sadness whisked inside her, but it was immediately buoyed by a sense of incredulity. How could a secret of this magnitude be kept from her, for so long? How had she not met him - sharing hearth and home, secrets and flesh - until now?

She suddenly felt giddy, on the verge of hysteria. She actually grinned. It was the grin of a mad-woman, and that eye looked at her, intrigued. This, all of this was hiding plainly and plainly hiding and she had not known. To think, all this time, her ex-lover could transform into a God (for all intents and purposes). How could she - him - it - be so closeted from this possibility ?

Her eyes skimmed the protrusion that was his chin, and they drifted to the side suddenly preoccupied by a splash of color –

And orange and yellow leaves swirled around her feet, as fragrant and vibrant as the flames crackling from over his shoulders – and the image did not create one of a devil basking in an inferno, but rather, it created the vision of a man standing stolidly before an open hearth, a man standing by the romantic glow of the fire; a man that had been searching for something that had been so absent from his fingers –

so that they had closed over hers in the cool autumn air, and —

Who had said it?

And, Heather knew. And she knew it so well that it was embarrassing she had not noticed it sooner. She tumbled onto her backside in a hail of the giggles. Struck, all fear fell away. In a knot of hysteria, she flung her head back to look at him.

As a high-functioning addict, she shouted:

“I love you, too?!” She flung her arms wide in a theatrical arch, laughing into the high peaks of hysteria. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Needed to hear? Is that why you lost your ever-loving mind? This is all because I never said it back? Di - no…” Heather trailed off as a jolt of clarity went through her. “You… no, it’s not because I never said it back. It goes deeper than that…”

She looked at his large green eye; it was flat.

“Y-you thought I didn’t love you back then? Seriously, Danny? Like, seriously? I did, I absolutely did. It’s just hard saying it back when it’s the first time, you know? I needed fucking time. And oh my god I can’t believe we’re having this conversation when I’m, like, three inches tall and you’re standing in front of me like half a moving solar system. Shit.”

She interpreted the contractile movement in his eye to be involuntary shock.

She folded her arms. “You can’t deal with your own shit, can you? Was it neat and tidy trying to get rid of me? Toss me out like morning trash? Was that what you had planned?”

The tongue licked the large bottom lip whose shadow canopied her head. (Heather cantered backwards instinctively) in a gesture she knew, at normal scale, to mean he was thinking.

“Can you control it?” She blurted.

An eyebrow sloped down over that stunning pale eye. She intuited it to mean he was prompting her for clarification.

Heather could feel herself almost lost in the radiant paleness of his eye. “I-I think it’s cuz I’m still kinda high right now that I’m holding my shit together, because you’re huge. But, can you control it? The… the… behavior; like… that lizard brain of yours… you have to on some level, cuz I’ve seen you doin’ life pretty normally… I’ve seen you at social gatherings; your company…” She suddenly trailed off: “With me.”

He said nothing, because he knew - she knew - they both knew - that she knew the answer to the question.

Heather gave him a cross look (or at least attempted to project herself toward that green eye). “That’s what makes it ugly, Danny. You can control it. But you didn’t, not with me.”

The entire side of his face nearest to her was inert. Even that large pale eye did not evince movement.

It was, she knew, the expression he wore that, were she at normal size, would be a carefully-composed poker face.

Good, her brain rallied, Get him to see me, really see me. Make him see me as a person… make him actually fucking see me.

And a more-quiet realization joined her thoughts: If can bust through that strong prey-dive, I might be able to actually fucking live through this.

And if she did? If she were to survive? What unholy trauma, what fall-out would she face from this?

But she had not the luxury to meditate on this. Heather had to survive. This she knew. And she knew it well because she was - always - a survivor. Through sheer will alone Heather pushed back. A woman made weapon, a weapon made of woman, she sought to slay Goliath with only her wit, and her moxie.

“And yanno what makes it even more ugly? You didn’t come clean about any of this. None of it. You were gonna toss me away. And you know why that’s so ugly?”

The eye had intent now, it was examining her. This meant it saw her as more than just a woman-shaped thing.

He’s listening, she said to herself.

“Because you decided for me.”

And, his black pupil - so-fixedly trained on her - expanded violently; contracted.

She had made her master stroke. She had driven him back - however imperceptibly - with a verbal bludgeoning. She had found grace because she had lain at his feet the most terrifying thing of all:

Possibility.

Once upon a time, Heather had lain awake in her bed late at night, counting the clicks of her eyelids as she had ruminated over her fate. She had attempted to piece apart his psychology like anatomical dissection: obsessing over how he had attempted to consume her, she thought, would give her critical insight. She had considered that the possibility existed that his attempt to eat her had been nothing but a perfunctory act: a rote contraction of movement that had barely, yawningly, stretched beyond other more base instincts.

But, no. That had felt incongruent, that had felt too simple. (Danny was anything but simple).

And she had chastised herself, berated herself over it for caring so damn much.

But it mattered. And she knew it mattered because she had to understand the genesis of his desire. To know it, was to control it. She had wondered if it was a limbic compulsion that had burst forth from his animal-brain. And if so, then she was nothing more than gristle off the bone for him; an inducement of taste and sensation and could wield no power from her position.

But, instead, if it was something more, something more than just base desire, if it was something more complex, something expansive, hoping as she did then, just as she did now –

The giant’s head withdrew –

then, she had a chance.

Then, she had an avenue through which she could manipulate him.

Because, she knew, only as a mad-woman could, that complexity made it dangerous. Complexity made everything dangerous. And danger could be weaponized.

Heather lolled her head back to observe him. She interpreted this new distance to mean he was now sitting (no longer leaning forward) at the table, and with the increased space between them her eyes could pan, with more ease, over his face.

In a blunted, but euphoric ripple of narcotic-sedation she stared up at her giant captor in peaking awe: he was stunning. His size was commanding; his presence yawning and infinite; his face deceptively, timelessly handsome.

And on that face, a story was playing out.

He had the keen look of a bored immortal that had just been roused to sudden wakefulness. His little worshiper – a woman that had been claimed by him, shaped by him, destroyed by him the moment she was worthy of his attention – was standing at the mouth of his cave, tip-toeing closer to get a glimpse of his leathered wings.

He saw her as a plaything to be contained. A curiosity to be tormented. He was a child-god that would pop her in his mouth for no other reason than he could –

But Heather’s be-deviled God was full of caprice, and she had said something that stirred him. She had done something that interested him.

The giant tilted his head to the side in a curiously-feral gesture.

“This is different.”

Heather could laugh-scream. He was speaking. And it wasn’t until this very (strained) moment did she realize that it had been some time since he last spoke.

But Heather was no body’s fool; she knew she wasn’t yet out of the woods.

Heather eyed him warily. “Different how?”

He made a languid movement; stopped. “I can almost forget.”

“Forget what?”

His voice deepened. “That we’re acting out millions of years of predator-prey evolution. I can almost - almost forget that you’re prey.”

Heather felt herself falter. Had she gotten nowhere with this obstinate asshole?

“No,” she lowed. “I’m not. I’m not prey.”

He gave her a patently amused look. “Bold claim coming from someone that’s stared down my fucking gullet.”

Heather twitched; his eye caught it with a preternatural flick.

He’s… no… he’s testing me… don’t, don’t give in. This is do or die, Heather. Don’t show him your fucking belly. Don’t freak out. Do it later, you have plenty of time to freak out later.

“No,” Heather pronounced. “Prey is a mindset. I’m not, and never will be, prey.”

She met him pupil-for-pupil; stroke for stroke; gaze for gaze. She held it; commanded it.

Bend, you motherfucker, fucking bend

His eyes held her, unmoving. Pale and alien.

Heather’s heart pounded.

He was unreadable.

And there was a sudden flicker of interest across his face.
His voice was a silky utterance. “No…”

Heather stiffened toward him.

Bend, you motherfucker, bend

And, as though at the receiving end of her telepathic urging: “I think… you may be onto somethin’ here…”

Heather looked at him, faltered again.
Something about his manner made her inch back.

Suddenly, his pupils widening, drinking her in: “I think you’re right. I think… you’re more than that. You’re a whole new… concept. A concept I need to,” he interjected a pleased, aroused sound.
“Play with more.”

@olo that’s actually the original title of the book before it became the public juggernaut it did.

@kisupure ruh roh? What vile little things are running around inside your head?

(I HAVE BEEN SO ABSENT GUYS. I travel for work, and I HAVE BEEN IN AND OUT OF QUARANTINE AND IN AND OUT OF AIRPORTS - AND it truly has been the worst! I plan on updating this very, very soon)

Lol Master of the Universe. Closet 50 Shades fan are we.