I woke up with a start. I could not remember what I had been dreaming about, but my heart was pounding as if I had run a marathon. I closed my eyes and focused on getting my breathing under control.

Inhale, exhale.

Inhale, exhale.

I opened my eyes.

Two things came to my attention immediately. First, I did not recognize the room I had woken up in. Second, I was naked under the bedsheets.

This second observation bothered me more than the first. In the age of map apps and ride hailing, getting back to the apartment was not much of an issue. If I did not have anything to wear however…

I sat up and scanned the floor around the bed. With no clothes in view, I took in the room proper.

I had assumed I was in a hotel room, and that assumption still seemed likely. The room was bland and impersonal. Pale blue walls. A desk and chair. A dresser. The door to my left. A window with the curtains drawn to my right. No decoration of any sort. Everything had a faint air of being artificial. Like IKEA furniture, only worse.

Something tapped against the window.

To call it a tap did not do it justice. The window—possibly the whole wall—shook with the force of it. Yet the impact was singular, without any other sounds to suggest something had bumped or crashed into the window by accident. A tap.

I got out of bed. With one hand I held the sheet around my waist for some modesty. With the other I pulled back the curtains.

A gigantic blue eye stared back at me.

I fell back with a startled yelp.

“Well, someone’s awake.”

I knew this voice.

The eye rose out of view, followed by a rush of color I could not identify. The room shook, and next the ceiling rose up and away.

I raised my head.

Towering above, colossal as to defy belief, was my flatmate, Miranda.

She grinned and waved at me with her right hand. Her left was holding the roof of the very building I was currently sitting in. Stunned, I raised a hand and waved back at her. She giggled again and lowered her free hand down into my room.

Contrary to my expectations, seeing her giant hand approach did not make the situation any less unreal. If anything, my disbelief only increased. The hand was so massive my brain struggled to recognize it as a hand. Instead it seemed like some foreign organism, an alien creature unto its own. I was so distracted I did not realized what was happening until the fingers had surrounded me.

Miranda was picking me up.

My fight or flight response kicked in with a vengeance, and I immediately began struggling to push the fingers back. It was too little, too late. Miranda’s fingers wrapped around me, my efforts ignored or possibly even unnoticed. Her thumb and index finger curled around my chest beneath my armpits, leaving my arms, shoulders, and head free. The rest of my body was enveloped in her hand. Her skin was warm, soft, and smelled faintly of fruit.

We lifted off.

For Miranda, I doubt the action was any different from lifting a small doll to her face.

For me, the experience was something else entirely. It was like being on a lift, except the lift supported me from my sides rather then beneath me, I could not move, I was very aware of just how high and how fast I was going, and instead of a pair of sliding doors, my view was of a giant woman in checkered pajamas. Not very much like being on a lift at all, really.

I came to a stop in front of Miranda’s face.

She was still smiling.

I was still staring.

I assumed my stomach was still somewhere on the floor below.

“Morning!” said Miranda.

It was surreal watching her speak. She could swallow me whole if she chose to. I tried to meet her gaze, but it was like trying to take in a landscape all at once. I found myself focusing on individual parts rather than the whole. Left eye. Mouth. Nose. A strand of blonde hair. Right eye. Right ear. Right eyebrow. Left eyebrow.

There was so much of her.

Miranda’s eyebrows furrowed.

“Are you all right?”

How could I possibly answer that?

“F-Fine,” I choked out. My voice sounded small even to my own ears. “Fine,” I repeated, louder. “Woke up from a bad dream.”

Miranda’s smile returned, softer than before. “Okay.” She bent over slightly. I watched in awe as she returned the roof to my sleeping quarters. With a loud click, it slotted back into place.

My earlier thoughts comparing myself to a small doll were more apt than I had realized. Miranda had lifted me out of a dollhouse. I knew where we were now. We were in our apartment. She was not gigantic—I was tiny.

Miranda started to hum. She listened to more music in a weekend than I did in a month, and was almost always humming as she moved about the flat. This in itself was nothing new. What was new was hearing her hum at this scale. As when she had picked me up in her hand, I lacked any frame of reference to properly convey the experience. The closest I could come was to imagine myself near a giant speaker. Technically, I was. I could feel her humming in my bones.

Miranda carried me through the flat. Like Miranda herself, the flat was achingly familiar and bafflingly different all at once. Furniture and items I had seen every day for the past two years now passed me by as alien monuments. The sofa we had rescued from the curb and hauled up four flights of stairs. The chair with the broken leg we both swore we would fix some day. The placeholder family portrait that came with the apartment we had never taken down.

This was my home, and I had never felt more of a stranger.

I was so lost in thought I did not realize we had stopped moving until Miranda set me down. I found myself on top of a flannel next to the sink. Miranda had brought me to the bathroom.

Still humming, Miranda plugged the drain and turned on the tap. The sudden rush of water startled me into taking a step back, off the flannel and onto the porcelain. It was freezing. I yelped and jumped back to the flannel. Above me, Miranda giggled.

“Poor thing,” she cooed. She turned off the tap and dipped her fingers in the water. “Don’t worry, bath will be ready for you soon.”

Miranda turned away from the sink and moved to turn on the shower. Though it was far louder than the tap had been, I hardly noticed. Instead, I stared at the sink. Bath? I was going to bathe? In the sink? How could Miranda act as though all of this was normal?

I turned around to get some answers. My questions died in my throat.

Miranda had taken off her pajamas.

When Miranda and I decided to flat share two years ago, we had both agreed not to “make things weird”. We changed in our own rooms, we did not leave clothes lying about, and if the bathroom door was even halfway closed, we always knocked first.

The most skin I had ever seen from Miranda was in a one piece bathing suit for about five minutes before she left to meet friends at the pool. After that encounter, I had had to lie down for an hour repeating, “Don’t make it weird, don’t make it weird,” under my breath.

Now Miranda was titanic, and I could see every inch of her without a stitch of clothing.

The triangle of her pubic hair, a smooth stomach, and above that, two round, full breasts capped with pink nipples. It was not that Miranda’s breasts were enormous. They seemed just slightly too large for her frame. That dissonance was enough to blur the line between a svelte body that looked zaftig, and a zaftig body that looked svelte. Everything is relative.

Miranda could not be called svelte or zaftig in the traditional sense. Perhaps a more accurate description would be solid. Unlike most (normal) human beings, who recovered from the work week by vegging out for forty-eight hours, Miranda went hiking. Not ordinary hiking. Miranda would hike eight hours through the wilderness, spend the night in a sleeping bag and a tent, hike eight hours back, and return home with more energy than when she started. Somehow. All that hiking had browned her face and her arms up to her biceps, but the rest of her skin was fair. She did not ripple with muscle, but her body radiated a sense of “being fit”.

Miranda approached the sink, her body looming larger with each step. Where before I might have been able to think of her in terms of a towering building, the removal of her clothing had destroyed any possible comparison with an inanimate object. Bare before me, Miranda looked like a goddess out of ancient mythology. With great effort, I dragged my gaze up to her face.

Miranda’s smile had changed. Before she had looked at me with a cheerful grin. Now she wore a predatory smirk.

“Oh my,” she murmured. Her eyes were locked on me. “Someone sees something he likes.”

It hit me that I had let go of the blanket when Miranda picked me up. I had been naked since, and the sight of Miranda’s own nakedness had given me the hardest erection of my life.

Miranda’s hands made a sharp slap as they landed on her thighs. Eyes never leaving me, she drew her hands up and around her vagina, up her stomach, finally coming to support her breasts. She leaned forward, enveloping me entirely in the shadow of her massive form. The tip of her tongue peeked out of her mouth and she very slowly wet her lips.

“Maybe you’d like to join me in the shower?”

In any other circumstance, I would have lost it then and there. As it was, my lizard brain was sending frantic signals of “beware-the-animal-that-is-bigger-than-you” to keep my libido in check.

Miranda’s right hand slid up her chest and came to rest tangled in her hair, while her left began to absently caress her breast. She groaned, a deep, husky sound.

“This is bad. You’re excited. I’m excited. But we’re going to be late for work at this rate.”

Her left hand picked up speed. Her right pulled free from her hair and reached for me. I did not try to fight this time. Her thumb and index finger wrapped around my chest again, but otherwise her hand remained open. Miranda lifted me to her face, my small body exposed for her. Even with her eyes half-lidded, I could see her pupils had dilated.

“Well, if we’re going to get clean anyway…”

With sudden speed she brought me to her mouth. Her tongue emerged, and in one movement licked me from my feet up to my chest. I shuddered. Her tongue was rough, wet, and warm. I had never felt anything like it.

Miranda pulled me back a little so our eyes could meet. The smirk had returned. “…No reason we can’t have some quick and dirty fun, is there?”

Miranda’s tongue returned. Each lick lingered a little bit longer, pressed against me a little bit harder. The rough bumps of her taste buds. The powerful muscle of her tongue. Her hot breath. Her wet saliva. Her voice, egging me on between each lick: “That’s it. Come on. Give it to me.” She may not have put me in her mouth, but it still felt as though she was devouring me.

Though unlike any sexual experience I had had before, I began to recognize the signs of increasing urgency. I had no idea how I had managed to hold myself back for so long, but Miranda’s encouragement had taken on a frantic heat, whispering because otherwise she would be screaming.

Miranda pressed me against her. Clutched between her hand and her mouth, I felt her all around me, felt myself drowning in her scent, her taste, her touch. Her lips engulfed my hardness.

“Come,” she murmured, the words reverberating through my whole body. “Come for me.”

I came.

***

I woke up with a start. I could remember vividly what I had been dreaming about, my heart pounding as if I had run a marathon. I closed my eyes and focused on getting my breathing under control.

Inhale, exhale.

Inhale, exhale.

I opened my eyes.

Two things came to my attention immediately. First, I was in my bedroom. Second, I was wearing a shirt and a very sticky pair of boxers.

I had not had a wet dream since I was a teenager, and that may have been the most powerful orgasm of my life.

I sat up with a groan. My bedroom was as it should be: my bed, my desk and chair, my dresser, my Van Gogh print I had gotten in college and never gotten rid of. All of it familiar. All of it not quite as it should be.

“Don’t make it weird,” I had chanted that day I saw Miranda in her swimsuit. I had meant those words. Then I had caught the disease and the choice was taken out of my hands entirely. We pretended of course. That we were still just flatmates. That we were still just friends. That we could not see our partnership turning to dependency.

I looked to the door. As close and as far away as the other side of the hall was Miranda’s bedroom. I wondered if she was awake.

I did not know when I had fallen for Miranda. It came upon me without my noticing, until I woke up one morning and realized the facts of life were: the sky is blue, water is wet, I love Miranda.

It was too late now. I was sick. I thought back to my dream. Of Miranda towering over me. Of Miranda looking at me with desire. That was all it was. A dream. Miranda at least saw me as a friend at six foot one. When I was a fraction of that? I would be lucky if she still saw me as a person.

I got out of bed and pulled off my boxers, trying to make as little a mess as possible. At four and a half feet tall I could still do my own laundry, which meant this was one accident I could keep a secret from Miranda at least.

I lifted the lid of my laundry basket. Every day, it felt a little bit heavier. I dropped my soiled boxers inside. I opened my dresser. Every day, the doors were a little bit harder to pull. I put a clean pair of boxers on. I climbed back into bed. Every day, it felt a little bit higher.

I pulled up the covers, closed my eyes, and hoped for a dreamless sleep.