All the while, Dylan endured the minute flexing and clenching of her leg muscle through the tender skin. It was intimidating like little else in his life, to experience the near-infinitesimal quivers and hardening of the woman’s lovely leg, likely with muscles she wasn’t even fully aware of using, yet strong enough to crush Dylan to pulp if, say, he was accidentally sandwiched between her palm and thigh with enough force. All it would take was August forgetting he was there, feeling the tickle on her leg, and slapping him like an errant fly out of instinct.

            With each step the woman took, the inch-tall boy was set into a rhythmic embrace against his apparent new owner’s leg. When she stretched her limb forward to launch herself onward, August’s sheer nylon spread further and thinner over Dylan’s back, binding him harder to the leg and splaying his arms. Then, when her weight shifted back to this leg while the other reached forward to step, the nylon relaxed over his back, yet the gentle bulging of her quadricep picked up the fabric slack and kept his body secured in the same place.

            Several times, Dylan made an attempt to scream for help, whenever August passed near to an equally giant customer, most of whom seemed to be women. He was only an inch, but he wasn’t microscopic; surely he should be discovered?

            Yet he wasn’t. No matter how much shouting he did, he only seemed to shake harder with frustration when no giant hands appeared through the stocking netting to rescue him. The crowd of almost exclusively young women was either willfully deaf, or his voice was much more of an insignificant squeak than he realized.

            Perhaps it was the fact of having his face held into August’s thigh. His oddly intimate position upon her pencil-like yet powerful leg made it so that all his yells were absorbed into the wall of unblemished skin and muscle. In effect, he was screaming for help to the uncaring woman’s leg, and he certainly would get no help there. He sensed his heartbeat trying to sync with the pulse within the leg. It was darkly funny; this morning, he could never have conceived of a bad situation where he had his face pressed against a lovely woman’s thigh inches from her nethers, yet here he’d discovered the exception.

            As he hovered in limbo just below the hip, Dylan’s mind affixed to the perceptions of his other senses. After all, he had only a smooth wall of leg to see, anonymous female voices rumbling to hear, and the occasional itch of the nylon against his scalp. He drew long breaths, hoping to remain calm, and also keep himself from sliding. The air was still redolent of that melon-flavored scrub, which was comforting, but a couple other notes had entered the aroma scape now. Nothing drastic, but a faint hint of staleness pervaded the fibers of the stockings; perhaps she hadn’t worn a clean pair today, out of convenience. Dylan only hoped August didn’t do anything strenuous today, to keep the scent from intensifying and overpowering the fruity soap.

            Ten minutes inside August’s nylon stretched into an hour. All the while, the ruthless yet soft-spoken bookstore clerk did almost nothing to acknowledge him with word or touch; occasionally her hands would hover over his position on her thigh, perhaps threatening to pinch or poke him through the stocking prison, but she never did. Taunting him. Still, Dylan was pleased that he hadn’t slid further down her leg, but at this point he was just desperate for small comforts.

            Unable to see what was happening outside August’s stocking, Dylan was surprised when he felt the fabric unpeeling from her limb again, and her fingertips scooping out his frail form. She plucked him back into the light, again safely hidden behind the desk and a stack of books.

            “I’m sorry!” he yipped instantly. Over the last hour, he’d mostly just been trying to devise the perfect words to get him off the hook here. August was serious before, which meant he couldn’t take this lightly, but she also was quiet and unassuming. A professional, in a strange way. She could see reason, and especially a bargain. “I’m really sorry. Honest. I’ll pay a fine, okay? Any fine. However much it takes. Not even to the store, just to you, if you want. I don’t have a lot on me, but my parents are pretty loaded, so we could make sure you’re-”

            “Do you remember seeing a mention of money in the text’s late fee warning?” August interrupted. She held him up to her smirking face, still gripped between her thumb and index finger.

            “N-No?”

            “Then you’ll know that neither I, nor the bookstore, are interested in a monetary late fee from you. That book you rented has a great many uses to a variety of people, more than can be measured with a dollar amount, and by holding it as long as you did, you caused several customers a delay in its use. So, your late fee must be more… lasting than a $5 slap on the wrist.”

            Dylan blanched. Could she honestly not be interested in that casual mention he’d made of essentially paying her a ransom for himself? She worked in a bookstore, for crying out loud. Who was going to say no to some easy cash, when she was holding all the cards in this situation? Hell, it wasn’t like she even had to be afraid that he’d come back and report on her. What was he going to do, point a finger and insist she used witchcraft to make him pay for a late book?

            “T-Thank you for taking me out of there,” he managed with a hard gulp. As full of rage and sickness as it made him to show gratitude to her, he realized that pushing down his pride was the only survival tactic here.

            “Oh, you’re welcome, though this is only a quick break. I just needed to handle an irritation.”

            “Irritation?”
            “Your clothes are making my leg itch,” she said. Her fingernail abruptly pinched its way under his shirt. “They have to come off.”

            Tussling and squirming every which way, Dylan did his best to resist. He gritted his teeth and threw his fists and feet at whatever dangling log of August’s finger he could reach. Of course it did nothing, and his blows bounced off her digits like punching bags. In the meanwhile, she clawed through his shirt and pants; rather than tugging them off his uncooperative body, she simply cut a slit in the tissue-thin shrunken garments with her filed fingernails.

            Suddenly Dylan was cowering in his underwear in the dastardly fingers of the giant bookstore clerk, and not even those were spared; with all of his former clothes removed, and ripped to shreds by August, Dylan was made to watch naked and helpless as his belongings were flicked into the garbage can below. At least she was gentle with him, and kneaded his skin with her spiraled fingerprints as his clothes were shorn away. With all the adrenaline pumping throughout his body, not to mention the tantalizing feeling of skin-on-skin, the college student was now getting bloodflow to at least one extremity he hadn’t before.

            “This should be much more comfortable,” August said as she re-opened the tight lip of the stocking. Her eyes sparkled with one last power-drunk glance at the bare, shrunken boy gripped in her fingertips. “For me, and possibly for you too, if you’re lucky.”

            Dylan was plunked back into the tube. The stocking snapped back around him and fastened him to her pale quad, face-first. Almost as soon as he’d descended to his former position on August’s leg, however, he realized things were different. Without the friction of his clothes to meet the nylon, staying in one place was more difficult. On the first step taken by the woman, the hapless one-incher slid a few millimeters down the curved slope of her skin.