“Oh, God,” your friend Chris cackles the next morning, idly tossing a frisbee to himself as he leans against a wall.  He shakes his head as you saunter as casually as possible back into the men’s dorm hallway, still wearing your clothes from the previous day, your backpack slung over one shoulder.  “Oh, man.”

            “Running out of exclamations already?” you groan smarmily as you try to pat down your hopelessly shaggy hair with the heel of your hand.

            “Hey, you’re so not going to turn this on me when it’s you doing the walk of shame,” he counters, clapping you on the shoulder several times as congratulations while you fumble with the key to your room.  “Not that I’m judging.  I couldn’t be prouder, actually.”

            “I’m so glad you approve.”

            “Don’t even tell me you’re not going to talk about this one, either.”

            “Talk about what one either?”

            He rolls his eyes and jokingly bonks the frisbee against your head.  “Dude, do not do this to me.  Me and bunch of the others have been trying for months to get you to tell a single detail about you and Ellie, and all I get is this again and again, even when I catch you red-handed.”

            “I don’t know what you want.  We just hung out later than we were meaning to,” you answer nonchalantly.  “If you want something steamy, go check out 90% of the internet.”

            “Everybody knows you’re doing it, man.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Ellie’s cute as hell.  Plus she’s smarter than pretty much everybody around here,” Chris quips with his arms crossed while leaning back against the door frame.

            “Definitely smarter than you,” you agree as you pull on a different shirt.  “Turn around unless you want to see the strip-down.”

            “I’m telling you, man, you’re going to need to confide in somebody if you don’t want it just building up inside you, ready to explode!” he continues, quickly turning his back on you as you change.  “Why can’t that be me?  I know how to keep a secret.”

            “I’m sure Professor Darbin would beg to differ.”

            “Oh c’mon, how am I not supposed to tell people where they can find good booze for cheap without an ID?  That would’ve been the real crime.  Almost as bad as what he was doing.”

            “You’re not really making yourself out to be the perfect candidate for talking about this,” you snort as you fish through your bookshelf for the right supplies for your first class of the day.

            “Ah-ha!  So you admit there is something to talk about,” Chris laughs as he turns back around and points an accusatory finger at you.

            “Guilty as charged,” you sigh with false dejection as you sling your backpack over your shoulder again and scoop up an apple from your desk that’s getting dangerously close to going brown.

            “All right, so what?  C’mon.  Give me one thing.  One thing to get me through this day.”

            “Okay, here’s something.  It’s a little thing I like to call book-learning.  Give it a shot,” you say with a wink, crunching a bite off the apple and clasping a book of French poetry into Chris’s chest as you slip back out the door.

            “How’s the reading coming?” you ask up to Ellie as you perch cross-legged at half an inch on her arched knee that feels more like a towering hill of denim to you.  With your homework already finished for the evening, all you have to do is enjoy the grand view of open expanse around you.  You peer across the chasm formed by Ellie’s torso stretched across her bed and almost lose your breath.

            “Just fantastic.  This Romanticism stuff might be the most boring thing I’ve ever read,” she groans, running a hand through her tinted golden locks.  “And I once had to read forty pages about PMRD patent models in size science.  I don’t know how you talked me into taking this class.”

            “I’m just real persuasive like that,” you shrug.

            “I’ve got a good mind to make you take a biochem course with me next semester so you’ll be the one squirming instead of me,” she says, slamming the book dramatically onto the sheets beside her, though her leg remains motionless as a mountain.

            “I think you’ve already seen enough of me squirming after that first semester here,” you retort.  “Seriously, science can go ahead and exist and run the functions of the world without my input.”

            “You have such a sad way of looking at things,” Ellie sighs piteously as she shakes her head.  Your heart flutters in your chest a little with adrenaline to see her gazing at you across this distance, but it quickly fades again.

            “Okay, fine.  If the world stops running just because I can’t tell you the first thing about recalcifract-”

            “Recalcifention.”

            “-recalcifention, then you just let me know, and I’ll do everything I can to study up.”

            “I’ll hold you to that,” she whispers seriously through narrowed lips as she leans closer toward her raised knee.  You can see her hand rising up from below, her tree-sized fingers walking themselves up the dizzying vertical climb of her jean-clad thigh, until her palm upturns just short of your perch at the summit of her bent leg, though you don’t rise immediately to clamber in like usual.  “Well?”

            “Sorry.  It’s just that you said “I’ll hold you to that,” and now I’m trying to come up with a good pun because you’re offering to actually hold me,” you say, holding up a finger as you chew it over.  “I got nothin’ though.”

            “Shut up and get into my hand,” she grumbles back at you, trying to hide a smile.  The both of you know full-well the hand would be instantly retracted if you didn’t actually want to board her massive appendage, but of course you do.

            Climbing into Ellie’s hand at this scale is always a fresh experience, no matter how many times you do it.  The sheer size of its rosy surface alone is overwhelming; most people don’t even have front yards this expansive.  There’s an inviting aura of her favorite tangerine hand lotion that wafts thickly in the air and fills your lungs pleasantly with every breath, intermixed with a hint of sweet perspiration from clammy palms earlier in the day.  That first step into the malleable pink terrain is warm and comforting despite the adjustment you have to make in your balance, as though entering a moon bounce for the first time, but other than any wobbling that comes from your motions, her hand doesn’t budge, and you doubt it possibly could.  She’s that focused, even though she doesn’t let it show in her eyes, and you can tell she takes pride in it.

            “I hope the soreness went away after yesterday,” she comments quietly, having seemingly decided that study time is over.  “Or if it didn’t, you really should lie about it to make me feel better.”

            “Will do,” you promise.  The both of you know that, even with your best poker face on, she’d see directly through any attempt at lying in an instant, whether you were six feet tall or the size of Ellie’s tooth.  It’s really just the thought that counts.

            Sighing, then, you force yourself to confront something else inside yourself as you smile up at Ellie’s eyes, telltale laugh lines forming on the edges of her beautiful gray pools as she smirks right back at you.  Now is the time, if ever.

            You’ve been tossing it back and forth in your mind all day, hardly able to concentrate in class after the implications of last night’s conversation with your best friend in the whole world and quite possibly more if you can learn to stop lying to yourself.  The very idea of mentioning it before seemed foolish and far too risky.

            Now, though, with your newfound policy of trusting Ellie to not only prevent you from being swallowed but, far more dangerously, trusting her to accept your vulnerabilities, it seems like a tangible possibility.

            “I was just… kind of wondering something,” you mumble under your breath.

            “What?” she asks with an earnest smirk.

            “I wanted to know…” you begin, but your throat goes dry at the sight of those enormous gray irises boring back into your skull, and suddenly you want to swallow your previous words from existence.

            Why are you doing this now?

            “Wanted to know what?”

            “Never mind.  It was… stupid.”

            “Hey.  C’mon,” she wheedles softly, tilting your chin up with the tiniest tap from the very tip of her hill of a fingertip, forcing you to make eye contact again.  How in the hell does she manage to do that so tenderly, let alone without breaking your neck?  “I thought we were trying out this new straight-talking thing?”

            You sigh.  She’s right, of course.  There’s never been a safer time or place to try laying a few things on the line.

            “I was wondering…” you utter, not allowing yourself another second to mull it over.  “…how small that thing can make me?”