You’re at a total loss as you witness Chloe, the once-towering tween goddess who trampled you beneath her damp soccer socks and stuffed you between her cheeks like a post-game refreshment, fumble through another torrent of tears. Despite having grown a full inch since that occasion eighteen months before, she looks smaller and more helpless now to you than she ever has before, even when the top of her head only reached your chest at full height.
She wipes her wrist back across her streaked cheeks and flushed nose. It seems like you should try to offer something else to help, but you can’t possibly craft a sentence coherent enough in the face of this stormy despair. So you remain in silence, allowing her pitiful cries to fill in the increasingly awkward gap. Finally your young cousin’s lips part again, uttering something so low that it takes a moment to parse it out completely:
“I didn’t mean it, Kenny.”
It’s as though you’ve had nitrogen injected directly down your spinal column.
Your neck snaps up to Sophie’s face above you, looking for support, but her expression is unchanged, still intently focused on her sister. You look to your mother, too, whose gaze hasn’t yet left you, but she doesn’t appear to have been affected either. Sophie’s fingers didn’t even twitch around you at the mention of the nickname Chloe gave you during your brief stint in her spoiled clutches. Involuntarily your limbs squeeze tighter around your cousin’s thumb, hoping to get her attention at this unexpected anomaly of bone-chilling seriousness. Maybe she didn’t hear it.
“I hope I can make it up to you,” Chloe whispers, her voice steadying at last as the ravenous spheres of her irises lock back onto you.
“W-What?” you mutter.
“I want to hold you again. It felt so good the first time I had you in my hands,” Chloe continues, sitting up at last and placing her hands atop the table. For the first time, you cringe, sinking deeper into Sophie’s palm for protection, your body tensed as though you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded firearm. “Won’t you let your Princess Chloe hold you one more time?”
“I… I d-don’t w-want t-t…” you stutter. More than ever, you wish you could shrink just a little bit further, out of sight and into the shadows of your loving cousin’s hand, where no one could find you. Where you could just sink into the balmy valley of the central crease in Sophie’s palm, ensconcing yourself in the vanilla effluvium of her favorite lotion and avoid the world’s entertained ogling forever. You notice your mother’s forehead furrowing slightly at your mewled nonsense.
“Awww c’mon. Yes you do. I know you do,” Chloe wheedles, leaning further across the counter as she breaks free of her mom’s embrace. “You’ll like it, too. I promise.” Her eyes, still raw and pink from crying, have opened wider, a hungry glint flashing like a beacon in the remaining welled tears. Her fingers drum impatiently against the tabletop. She then overturns her right hand, opening her palm as she reaches out to her older sister’s protectively curled appendage.
“S-Sophie?” you choke out.
“Jack?” Sophie says, raising an eyebrow at your muttering at nothing in particular. “Do you need something?”
“All I want is to know what it feels like again for just a second. To have an itty-bitty boy of my very own,” Chloe insists. “And maybe… one more quick little taste. If that’s okay…”
“NO!” you screech, now actively scrambling backward in Sophie’s palm, but finding her fingers are actually impeding your progress, still wrapped snugly around your shoulders and waist. As though she wanted you to stay put, with Chloe’s hand inching closer every second. As though she was offering you up.
“Mom?” you squeal.
“Only a little one. I won’t eat you like last time. I promise,” Chloe giggles unconvincingly as her fingers walk their way up Sophie’s forearm, her palm closing overtop of your cousin’s hand and sandwiching you in between. It takes practically no effort on her part to pry you from under Sophie’s thumb, which offers zero resistance to the theft. Immediately you’re squeezed up against her plush palm, her firm fingers coiling tightly around your limbs, binding you to her skin.
“N-No, no no no… SOPHIE!” you scream, thrashing uselessly in your younger cousin’s fist as she steadily draws it back across the table toward her face. “MOM!”
Your parent’s countenance appears as gloomy and unaware of her surroundings as she did when you first entered the room. There’s clearly no help to be had there. Sophie, rather than leaping across the table to retake you from her sister like you assumed she would, relaxes into her stool. “Calm down, Jack. All she wants is a little taste. Why don’t you just try to be cool about this for once?”
“Aunt Selina?” you beg desperately, turning toward your relative next to Chloe, who looks just as contented with the situation as both of her daughters.
“Sophie does so much for you, Jack. Don’t you realize that? She hardly ever sees her own friends now because of how often she comes around to your house to take care of you,” your aunt notes with what you realize is legitimate irritation.
“I… I-” you sputter.
“She never goes on any trips, or to the movies. No dates, even though she gets asked practically every other week. She even skipped her prom just to sit with you when you wouldn’t stop crying over a bad dream like a wimpy little three-year-old!” Selina continues.
“It’s true,” Sophie confirms solemnly.
“I d-didn’t want you to,” you mutter, feeling an even sharper sting from this uncomfortable revelation about your cousin’s sacrificial priorities than the fact that your relatives are apparently content with you being manhandled by a carnivorous teen. “I wouldn’t ask you to stop your life for me. Ever.”
“Well, of course you don’t ask, because you’re too scared to even talk to anyone about anything,” Sophie states calmly. “What else am I supposed to do? I just put up with you so you don’t go and jump under someone’s shoe to end it all and make me feel like a total bitch.”
Air hisses from your lungs. You feel as though your entire Adam’s apple might lurch down your gullet. There’s no response to that one. Sophie, seeing she’s got you trapped, leans back in her chair, arms crossed proudly.
“Really. It seems like the LEAST you can do is pass along the goodwill and let Chloe play with you for two measly minutes,” your aunt huffs.
“WHAT?” you cry, now with your own tears pouring out from the shock of this entire ambush, and suddenly you feel muggy moisture fogging against the nape of your neck. You crane your head around in time to watch Chloe’s pillowy lips spreading apart, revealing her glistening white teeth into a smug grin for just a moment before clacking the pearly rows together. The grinding collision earns a terrified twitch from you on each repetition. Satisfied, then, her fingers ripple around your body to adjust her grip, her thumb pressing up against your chest and under your chin to ensure you remain looking straight ahead at her cheekily triumphant countenance.
Your kiddish cousin, bouncing her blonde locks against her shoulders, at last opens her jaws wide, releasing her writhing red serpent of a tongue from its humid encroachment.
There’s no possible defense for you as you’re forcefully face-planted by Chloe’s powerful fist into the spongy surface of her bud-stippled muscle. For a moment she just allows your flavors to be sopped up into the spit-slogged beast, the entire thing wriggling and flexing against your body.
As your clothes rapidly absorb the hot liquid trickling in rivulets down the dell of your cousin’s tongue, you gasp awkwardly for breath, fighting to turn your head to the side. You succeed, but still find your nose and mouth pinned unyieldingly into the slimy flesh. With some determined exertion, you manage to pull your face away from the teen’s massive, throbbing muscle as it continues to sample and suckle at your body. Gluey strings of her crystalline saliva dangle from your cheeks like tinsel.
“HELP!” you gasp, nearly choking on a thick wad of phlegm that traveled down Chloe’s tongue from the back of her throat. “HELP M-”
Sophie, Aunt Selina, and your mother all remain still and silent as statues as your young and clearly still half-crazed relative presses her thumb against the back of your skull, plunging your helpless head back into the river of her gummy saliva. With the fleshy pad of her fingertip held over you, there’s no fighting your way out for a breath this time.
You can hear it all churning inside the moist cave like the inner workings of an industrial turbine. Glistening rivers of tropical slop, froth formed in foamy clusters, and globs of sickly mucus. Everything. Chloe’s cheeks slosh as clean floods of spit come rushing down from the roof of her mouth, all flowing toward a singular spillover point right over your gasping face.
Several agonizing seconds flow by as your cousin tastes you, as promised, but as you feel her adhesive spit congealing along your skin and into your hair, you can feel her sticky fingers loosening around you. In the next instant her palm has released its unrelenting grip on you, leaving you spread-eagle and glued to Chloe’s tongue like a hapless gummy bear.
It’s like being melded into a glue trap. No possible twitch of your body involuntary or not could hope to free you. Your clothes are already starting to peel off, stripping you back down to the inhuman little freak you had imagined yourself to be for so long. Truly the only thing separating you from brave survivor and mealy morsel are a few scant layers of fabric thin enough to be husked away from your vulnerable skin after just a few vigorous licks from a broiling red muscle. The shirt goes the easiest, as it’s already been dredged like tissue paper from your back by a quick sweep of Chloe’s thumb. Your pants are quick to follow, sliding hopelessly off the end of her guzzling snake of a tongue.
You open your mouth, wanting to cry out for help again, or at least something to cover up your humiliatingly exposed body before the prying eyes of your extended family while Chloe has her apparently deserved fun, but find yourself out of things to say. Once again, you hear no roars of dissention from your beloved kin. Not even a peep. Not from Aunt Selina, who just spent a year and a half helping to mend a daughter who so nearly resorted to human savagery. Not from Sophie, the spitting image of a crazed goddess who gave up her whole life to make sure you could rebuild yours. And not even from your mom, who now has to live with the knowledge that you were tortured for half a decade under the same roof as her. Like you’re the only one who’s not in on the maddest practical joke of all time. Instead of words exiting your lips, a fresh wad of bubbly froth sloshed up from Chloe’s uvula passes into your mouth.
Perhaps it’s just inevitable that you’ll find yourself in these places again and again in a continuous cycle. Maybe the freedom you thought you clawed your way toward after five years in your sister’s sock drawer was just a mirage. Why should anyone listen to someone like you, anyway? A timid little toy boy, not even three inches tall, that the world had already learned to live without, and now is forced to begrudgingly accommodate instead. What are you to them?
Right now, clearly, a snack.
Your cousin’s stubby fingertips pinch at your butt, shredding your underwear away from your trembling and now-nude body at last as a cataract of flecked spittle and spiteful giggles erupts from her esophagus. Her thumb presses into the small of your back one last time, ensuring every last inch of your body is dragged through the garden of squirming taste buds to quench her voracious curiosity.
A victorious moan gurgling up from the darkness of her digestive tract, Chloe slurps you into the swampy chasm of her mouth, her tongue pancaking your useless frame to the roof of her mouth as a fresh moat of slobber floods into your darkened world.
“Jack, what’s wrong?” Sophie gasps. Her voice cracks in a desperate panic as she continues holding you in her quavering palm, which you haven’t left for a moment of this visit. Your mother, aunt, and Chloe all watch in stupefied awe.
“Honey?” your mom croaks, too petrified to do anything other than twitch.
“JACK!” Your cousin chokes out a helpless wail as you release the protective grasp on her fingers and fold into yourself, shrieking and sobbing at the ghostly visage of Chloe’s gaping throat imbibing you down into the slimy purgatory of her gastrointestinal tract.