As she closed her apartment door behind her, Callie leaned her back against it.

Her navy blue backpack dropped with a heavy thud to the side, and she slowly slid down to the shabby linoleum-tiled floor. The black fabric of her baggy sweatpants cushioned the impact as her butt met the cold hard floor. Her face was hidden behind trembling fingers, their well-manicured tips protruding through disheveled honey-blonde bangs as the base of her palms rested on the tip of her petite chin.

Mondays were always the worst for Callie, at least they had been since the start of the spring semester. Wednesdays and Fridays weren’t really any different from the start of the week, but that extra day off that the weekends provided gave her a false sense of relief, one that was shattered every Sunday evening and replaced by the dread of knowing what she would have to face again the following afternoon.

And now here she was again, trying to hide her shame from the world while sitting just barely inside her dingy old apartment.

These are supposed to be the best years of your life, Callie, she thought to herself. How could you let them turn into this?

Callie gave a long, deliberate exhale as she dropped her hands and tilted her head back, dark golden tresses leaking from underneath the hood of her light gray sweatshirt as they pooled atop her shoulders. She blinked tears from her eyes as her gaze fell upon the worn gray countertop of her kitchen.

And then she froze.

Dangling from the top of the counter to the floor was a piece of thread, attached at its highest point to a small makeshift hook made from a paperclip lodged into the crevice of a slightly ajar drawer. But it was less the presence of the odd combination hanging from her counter and more the fact that she didn’t even own a paperclip, let alone take the time to tie one to thread and hook it there, that bothered her so much.

Someone was fucking with her.

For the past week, Callie had noticed small things that were out of place in her apartment. Food crumbs randomly spread along the counter one day and holes ripped into a bag of bread on that same counter the next. She also thought she noticed pens and other small items moved about on the desk in her room and the living room coffee table, but it was hard to tell with such negligible things.

But this, this was anything but negligible. Up until that point, she was convinced that she had a rat problem or something like that. Rats don’t tie thread and paperclips together, though. Someone had been in her apartment.

Or maybe they were still there.

As soon as the thought occurred to Callie, she was on her feet and rushing into the kitchen. Hands shaking, she opened a nearby drawer and pulled out a large butcher knife, part of a set in a still unused apartment-warming gift from her parents.

“Alright fucker!” she yelled, holding the knife in front of her, the blade guiding her as she slowly started to move about the apartment with cautiously wandering eyes. “If you’re still in here, come out now and you can leave. Otherwise, you’re gettin’ stabbed!”

For the next twenty minutes, Callie intensely searched her home. Despite the bravado with which she spoke, she really hoped no one would show themselves. After all, given her soft, friendly nature, she wasn’t sure if she was capable of actually following through on her threat.

After thoroughly investigating the apartment, she was satisfied that whatever creeper was fucking with her had long since left. Noting the time, she quickly changed her clothes and left for work, realizing that she had just enough time to avoid being late for her shift.

She tried to put the incident out of her mind but made sure to lock the door after leaving the apartment.

********

Callie returned to her apartment four-and-a-half hours later, finally feeling a bit better about the whole ordeal. In fact, she was starting to wonder if she had overreacted just a little bit when she noticed, once again, that something was different in the kitchen.

There, waiting for her on the card table that served as her dining room table, Callie spied a roughly ripped sliver of notebook paper, likely torn from a much larger page.

She picked up the clearly impromptu note, holding it before her eyes with either side being secured between her respective thumbs and forefingers. Squinting, she was just able to make out the message, clearly scribbled in messy haste and uncommonly small:

Sorry for scare. Not intent.

Callie took in the lettering, about half the size of a finger nail’s-width, unsure what to make of it. She had so many questions: Who had left the note there? By scare, did they mean the paperclip and thread? What even was their intent, then?

But before she could consider the answers to those questions, a quiet, almost inaudible noise resembling a light wrapping on metal directed her attention to the kitchen counter that lay beyond the other side of the table.

Callie’s attention was immediately drawn to the microwave sitting near the end of the counter, or rather, who was standing near its back end. Greatly dwarfed by the appliance, not even measuring a quarter of its height, was a man dressed in the tattered ensemble of a t-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, their long-faded colors hard to discern from a distance through the layer of grime and dirt covering them.

The two locked eyes, hers filled with surprise and wonder and his with hesitation and worry. This stalemate wouldn’t last, however, as Callie’s instincts took over.

Without thinking, she swiftly moved around the table, making a beeline for the little guest occupying her countertop. While the man was slightly slower to break from his trance, he recovered quickly, scampering behind the microwave before she could reach him.

Callie’s hip crashed into the countertop clumsily as she reached her destination. She shifted the microwave to the side just in time to see the shoes of the man disappear through the semi-circular hole in the wall that she was using the appliance to hide.

With him gone, rational thought soon returned to her, and she instantly regretted her rash actions.

“Wait!” she cried.

But Callie’s plea came too late, and the miniature man was already well within the walls of her apartment. She apologized profusely as she addressed the wall, upset with herself for scaring him off.

Rather than dwell on her mistake, however, she instead made her way to her room, where she grabbed her laptop and laid on her bed, suddenly eager to do a bit of research for once.

********

As it turned out, the internet had startlingly little information about tiny people, at least ones that weren’t considered fictional. Still, Callie absorbed anything on the subject that she could find, hoping that some of it might be relevant to understanding the tiny tenant wandering within her walls.

A night’s worth of researching left her rather groggy after waking up from two hours of sleep late into the morning. Having slept through her alarm, she rushed to dress herself in shorts and a fashionable blouse, attire much more appropriate for the Southwestern climate of the area.

Before running off to her first class of the day, for which she would surely be late, Callie grabbed a granola bar from one of her kitchen cabinets. As she passed by the hole in the kitchen wall, she stopped. After a few seconds of thought, she broke a corner off of the bar and left it directly in front of the hole before making her way to class.

********

After getting through her back-to-back Tuesday classes and returning home, Callie was elated to discover that the piece of granola she had left in front of the hole was gone. She approached the small opening, leaning over and resting her lower abdomen and elbows on the countertop, her chin cupped in her open palms.

"Hi, I'm Callie," she said. "I just wanted to apologize again for yesterday. It was pretty shitty of me, and I'm not even sure why I did that."

From there, the social butterfly within Callie took over. She cheerily recapped her day to the hole in the wall. Occasionally, she would ask a question to the man she hoped was listening, but no response ever came. Still, she thought it would be rude to drone on about herself without at least giving him a chance to join in the conversation.

Eventually, she made herself some ramen for dinner, leaving a few noodles on a plate near the hole. After finishing her meal, she went about her usual night-off routine of studying and relaxing, taking a minute to speak to her hidden guest from time to time.

And Callie continued incorporating him into her day the next morning. She would speak to him and leave him food between her spread-out Wednesday class schedule. But the diminutive dude hanging out in her walls still didn't seem to be comfortable enough to reveal himself.

Thinking about the poor guy even helped distract her as she endured yet another Wednesday afternoon. Even though it still filled her with a sense of both disgust and self-loathing, she manged to perk herself up afterward at the thought of maybe getting the chance to make a better impression.

Of course, the pint-sized person was nowhere to be found when she returned home, although he had once again accepted her food offering. Undeterred, Callie swore to herself that she would find a way to break the ice with him.

While getting ready for her second work day of the week, an idea struck her. She grabbed a post-it note and broke off as tiny a piece of graphite as she could from one of her mechanical pencils, setting the two writing tools in front of the hole and next to a plate with a slice of cheap reheated pizza.

"Well, I'm off to work," Callie announced before walking out the door. "The place is yours for, like, the next four hours.

"No parties!"

She giggled at her little joke as she left, preparing herself for her next shift in retail hell.

********

Her shift having left her exhausted, Callie lumbered through the entrance to her apartment. Between classes and work, she was ready to call it an early night. However, that fatigue melted away as she moved into the kitchen.

It didn’t take her long to remember that she had left the little man tools with which to communicate with her indirectly. Checking the countertop, she quickly realized that he had made use of them.

The lettering was slightly larger and much more crisp this time around, and it appeared as though his diction had expanded upon being told just how much time he had to compose this new letter.

Callie,

Thanks for the food and conversation. It means a lot, and I really appreciate it.

Your tiny neighbor,

Duncan

P.S. No parties, but I did have a “get together” with Tom Thumb, Thumbelina, Jiminy Cricket, and Daniel Radcliffe. I hope that’s okay?

Callie felt her lips curl almost autonomously into a genuine smile.

“Anytime!” she beamed, aiming her excitement at the hole in her kitchen wall. “And let me know the next time you have one of these ‘get togethers.’ I’d hate to accidentally step on Harry!”

********

“Duncan?” Callie called out. “Do you think you might wanna come out and talk tonight?”

She stepped toward the kitchen table, the hem of her short denim skirt settling mid-thigh on her. She had paired the skirt with a stylish white off-shoulder ruffle-trim blouse with short sleeves.

Although it was normal for Callie to up her fashion game on Thursdays, as she would hit the bars in an effort to forget about having to deal with her least favorite class one final time for the week the following day, this time was different. This time, she wanted to make a good impression on, or at least appear as non-threatening as possible to, one particular person.

After Duncan reached out to her the previous night, she decided that now was the time to try and have a real conversation with him. She had once again added him to her daily routine from the morning to evening time, and now she would try to coax him to come out into the open.

The first step was to reassure him that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the last time the two had met face-to-face.

“Sorry again for lunging at you the other day,” Callie said. “It’s just that I saw you and I, uh, I wasn’t ready for it, I guess?

“Like, my first instinct was to grab you to see if you were real.”

A quick glance toward the hole in the wall showed no signs of movement. But she didn’t expect this to be easy.

“But I’m ready now,” Callie said. “If you decide to come out, there’ll be no grabbing this time.

“I’ll keep my hands to myself. Promise.”

She still didn’t notice any activity coming from the hole. She gave a slight sigh, but remained optimistic.

“But yeah, it’d be cool if we could talk,” Callie said.

She was about to continue but was startled by a small noise, sounding oddly like a very faint clearing of someone’s throat, coming from below her on the table. Looking down, she saw the tiny guy emerge from behind her saltshaker.

He had scruffy brown hair and a scraggly beard of the same color. Callie could now see that, through the dirt that covered him, his shirt and shorts, ripped and torn all over, were originally white and black, respectively.

He craned his neck upward before Callie heard his voice for the first time.

“I was kind of thinking the same thing,” he said.

********

From the moment he stepped out from behind the saltshaker, Duncan was second-guessing his decision.

After all, it wasn’t as though this was his first encounter with giants. Well, technically everything and everyone else was normal-sized and he was tiny, but such distinctions didn’t really matter to him. Perspective is king, and from where he was standing, he was just a regular guy stuck in a giant world.

“Wow,” Callie’s powerfully deep yet distinctly feminine and slightly pitchy voice echoed all around him.

Her right hand came for Duncan as though it had a mind of its own, her awed gaze never breaking from his small form, almost staring right through him. As her long, delicate fingers reached the midpoint between their massive mistress and tiny target, he took a couple cautious steps backward, stopping only when his back met his former hiding place.

He tried to say something, anything really, but his voice caught in his throat. No protests came out of his mouth, nor did any begging, pleading, or defiant cursing. Instead, he was frozen in fear as he leaned against the saltshaker, questioning why he ever thought this was a good idea.

Upon seeing this reaction, however, Callie’s eyes widened with recognition, and her hand stopped abruptly.

“Shit, sorry!” she said, pulling it back swiftly. “Caught me by surprise again. For real though, I’m not gonna get grabby. See?”

The giantess laid her hands at the edge of the table. Her lengthy digits splayed slightly as she gently pushed off against the surface. The legs of her chair screeched loudly against laminate tile flooring as they retreated, coming to rest once its occupant’s towering torso was slightly less than a foot away from the table.

Callie’s hands laid atop one another, right over left, on the tabletop directly in front of her. Then, her upper body folded, her breasts leading the way like perky teardrops as they fell from view under the table’s edge. Her movements reminded Duncan of an old drawbridge he used to see everyday near one of his childhood homes.

As her chin came to rest atop the knuckles of her right hand, the titaness gave the tiny man her most reassuring smile.

“There,” Callie said. “And I should be able to hear you better like this, too. You came off kinda quiet when I was sitting up.”

For a moment, the two of them just stared at one another in uncertain silence. Callie’s eyes, nebulous waves of green and reddish-brown crashing against each other in perfect symmetry on either side, zeroed in on him with a gentle intensity as she studied him intently from her closer perspective.

Duncan momentarily lost himself in their radiance as they reflected the florescent lighting of the uncovered bulb swinging softly high above the table with an elegant brilliance. Mercifully, Callie broke the stalemate first, ending the trance she had unknowingly placed him in.

“So,” she began, “are you, like, a borrower or something?”

Duncan’s face scrunched in confusion.

“No?” he answered. “The fuck’s a borrower?”

Duncan found his attention drawn to just below Callie's cute, slightly upturned nose, where her lusciously plump lips, lightly glazed in pink gloss and each noticeably thicker than one of his legs, were curved in a contemplative frown.

“They’re little people that live in walls and steal food and stuff from us big people,” she said, before mumbling, “at least that’s what Wikipedia says.”

Duncan nodded along with Callie’s words.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit, I guess I am one then. I didn’t realize they had a word for that.

“Wait, does that mean there are other people stuck like this, too?”

Callie shrugged her shoulders, the exposed pale skin of their tops visible to Duncan through waterfalls of honey tresses ending in enticing pools of dark gold on either side of her chin.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Google didn’t show anything about real little people, and I never really watched the movies or read the books about borrowers when I was a kid, so I don’t even know if you guys are supposed to travel in packs or whatever.”

It took a few seconds for the meaning behind Callie’s words to sink in for Duncan.

“Books? Movies?!” he asked. “Did you just ask if I was a fictional character?!”

Callie rushed to defend herself against the little man’s incredulity.

“At least I didn’t admit to being one,” she muttered. “Besides, what was I supposed to think? It’s not like tiny little people are a thing. Usually. So when one starts climbing out of my walls, I’ve gotta think outside the box, ya know?”

Before Duncan could respond, Callie spoke once again.

“Hold up,” she said slowly. “You said ‘stuck like this.’ Does that mean you haven’t always been so … short?”

This time, Duncan was quick to answer.

“I was normal-sized until about six months ago,” he explained. “I shrank on my girlfriend’s doorstep, right in front of her eyes.

“Or ex-girlfriend, I should say.”

Callie cringed slightly at the word ex-girlfriend.

“You guys broke up?” she asked.

Duncan chuckled derisively in response.

“Not officially, I guess,” he said with a hint of bitterness. “But nothing says ‘it’s over’ quite like having to pick a pad lock with a piece of hamster bedding to escape the cage they put you in.”

Callie’s eyes went wide. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out at first. After a moment’s hesitation, she finally spoke up.

“So you can pick locks?” she asked awkwardly. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

For the first time since revealing himself, Duncan exchanged his nervous, guarded expression for a wry grin.

“I had a pretty fun childhood,” he replied.

Callie giggled at his answer.

“I’ll bet you did,” she said, pausing for a minute after her laughter subsided.

“But seriously, she put you in a damn cage?”

Duncan’s smile quickly vanished.

“Yeah,” he answered solemnly. “You know, my first thought after shrinking, after I got over the panic attack and my head cleared a little, was ‘Thank God Kristie’s here.’ We had been going out for a little over a year when it happened, and she was the only person I really trusted. I felt lucky. I felt safe.”

Duncan swallowed hard, fighting to hold back the tears building up behind his eyes.

“And then she … she ...”

Duncan went quiet, staring blankly down at the tabletop in front of him as his back slid down the length of the salt shaker.

“Is it … is it okay is if I don’t talk about her?” he finally asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The question earned a quizzical frown from Callie.

“Of course,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. You know that, right?”

Without looking up, Duncan only gave a timid nod in response.

“Good,” she said hesitantly. “Like, I really don’t want you to feel forced to talk to me.”

Duncan didn’t acknowledge Callie that time, and the giant girl wasn’t entirely sure that he heard her. He just kept staring at the ground, obviously lost in thought.

Slowly, and deliberately this time, the giantess slipped her right hand out from under her chin and moved toward Duncan. He didn’t seem to notice, completely dropping his guard for the first time in the conversation. Her hand crept cautiously to the tiny man’s right side. With the tip of her index finger, which was large enough to swallow his shoulder, she rubbed his right arm up and down its length.

Duncan’s head shot up, his body jumping slightly at Callie’s touch. His neck swiveled as his eyes traced from her finger to her face, which wore a kind expression.

“I know I said I’d keep my hands to myself, but you looked like you needed that,” she said. “I can stop if you want.”

Duncan turned his attention back to the finger offering him comfort. He studied it intently, and Callie could almost see the internal debate taking place inside his head.

“No, it’s fine,” he said slowly, not sounding entirely sure. “Th-thanks.”

Duncan tilted his head toward the ceiling, staring up at the kitchen’s florescent lighting as he took a deep breath. He sat there for a minute, just letting Callie comfort him. When he turned his attention back to her, he gave her a slight smile and a silent nod, which she took as a sign to return her hand to its rightful place beneath her chin.

“So anyway,” Duncan moved ahead with his story, “after I … got out of that situation, I didn’t really know where to go. Kristie was the only person I ever really trusted, and that … that didn’t work out so well for me.

“So without anywhere or anyone in mind, I just picked a direction and started walking.”

The minuscule male began to regale the colossal Callie with the tale of his long journey, building momentum with his storytelling as he his memories moved further past the … unpleasantness of his experiences with Kristie.

“So you would think sticking to the grass instead of the sidewalk would be a good way to avoid giant feet coming down on you, right?” he said. “Well, let me tell you a little something about phones and their effect on how much people pay attention to where they step ...”

********

“Whoa, whoa whoa. Hold up. You fought a squirrel?!” Callie asked, trying to keep from laughing but failing miserably. “Like, a super cute and cuddly squirrel?

“Over a chunk of hot dog?!”

A scowl crossed Duncan’s face.

“Yeah, well they’re a lot less cute when they’re three times your size and hungry,” he said. “That asshole looked more like a grizzly bear on top of another grizzly bear to me.

“And that hot dog was the closest thing to real, human food I’d seen in a week!”

Callie stopped laughing, looking lost in thought at Duncan’s words.

“Wow,” she said in an almost faraway tone. “I didn’t really think of it like that, but yeah, that must have actually been pretty scary for you.

“So what did you do?”

Duncan paused as he deliberated in his head the least embarrassing way to tell the story.

“He ended up jumping on top of me,” he said, holding his right side. “He dug those God damned monster claws into my side. I thought he was going to tear out my kidneys or something else important.”

Callie anxiously leaned just a little bit closer to her little guest, her sumptuous lips mere feet away from him on his scale.

“Yeah?” she said with a breathless eagerness. “And then?”

Duncan lowered his head, partially from embarrassment and partially in preparation for the reaction that was surely coming.

“I kicked it in the balls, and it ran away,” he said sullenly.

For a single solitary moment, silence fell throughout the kitchen. That silence was quickly filled with full-throated feminine laughter. Unable to control herself, Callie’s warm cherry-scented breath forcefully blew over the table, gently ruffling Duncan’s short brown hair and the ripped sleeves of his tattered shirt.

Still, he had to admit, it was actually pretty pleasant, if not a bit sticky, reminding him of a balmy summer breeze.

“I-I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she gradually recovered after a solid 30 seconds of laughing. “It’s just, that’s just too funny! I know that had to be rough for you, but, come on! Who else can say they kicked a squirrel in the balls?

“Like, do they even have testicles?!”

Despite the warm redness still present on his cheeks, Duncan looked back up at Callie.

“They only come out in the winter, actually,” he said. “I never thought I’d be happy to be tiny in December.”

Reliving the whole ordeal in his mind, Duncan felt a swell of anger rise up from within.

“But if I ever get my size back, the first thing I’m going to do is chop that piece of shit Bigsby’s tree down,” he said. “Let’s see how tough that smug bushy-tailed fucker is when he’s homeless!”

Duncan’s outburst seemed to take Callie by surprise. She stared at him blankly for a moment.

Then the laughter came once again.

“Bigsby?!” she questioned with a renewed giggle. “Did you for real name the squirrel Bigsby?

“Why not Steven? Or Stuart? Or Sergio?”

Lowering his head, Duncan gave his answer nonchalantly.

“It was the dumbest name I could think of,” he said.

Callie’s laughter gradually died down, but an amused look remained on her face.

“So you gave him a bad name just because you hate him?” she asked. “Bitter much?”

Duncan looked up at Callie with a faux dark expression.

“My vengeance knows no bounds,” he joked. “I wouldn’t fuck with me if I were you.”

A self-satisfied smirk touched Callie’s lips as her eyes rolled at her small house guest's advice.

“Noted,” she said, matching the minute man’s laugh.

With that, Duncan took the opportunity to steer his story back on track.

“Anyway, Natasha found me not too long after that,” he said. “She was actually kind of nice, at first.”

Callie’s eyes narrowed as she took in what Duncan had so casually put out there.

“Hold up, someone else found you too?” she asked. “Where’s this Natasha now?”

Duncan shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, she’s still around, I’m sure,” he said. “She found me when I was wandering around in the grass, probably too close to the sidewalk. And like I said, things went pretty well at first.

“She nursed me back to health and everything.”

Callie looked at him questioningly.

“Back to health?” she asked. “What was wrong with you?”

Lifting his shirt up, Duncan revealed the scarred remnants of claw marks running diagonally down the right side of his torso.

“Squirrels carry all kinds of bacteria in those claws,” he explained.

Callie grimaced as she took in the old wound but chose to not interrupt Duncan’s story again.

“So anyway, I was feeling all kinds of shitty,” he said. “And Natasha just so happened to hear me mumbling some incoherent shit because of my fever as she was walking by. Turns out we were right in front of her house.

“So she took me inside and helped get my fever down.”

Duncan stopped for a minute, remembering how nice that first day had been. He found himself wondering just what had happened to make it all go south.

“Things changed after I recovered,” he said, maintaining a casual tone. “After that, she started treating me less like a person and more like a slave. She liked to jab at me with her toes, spit on me, blow her cancer stick smoke in my face, and hold me down with a finger or her foot.

“Every night, she would tie my wrists and ankles together with dental floss and toss me in her panty drawer.”

Duncan looked up and was shocked to see horror written all over Callie’s face. The poor giantess looked almost on the verge of tears. He stopped listing the horrors he faced while under Natasha’s “care,” unsure how to process Callie’s reaction.

After all, having someone show legitimate concern for him was foreign territory for the maladjusted mini.

“After about a week, she had me picking up her toenail clippings for her,” he said, ultimately deciding to gloss over several of the other details of his time with Natasha. “I ended up stashing one of the sharper ones in my shorts, and I used it to cut through the floss while she was sleeping. She left the drawer just a tiny bit open, so I was able to climb out and escape.

“It may be that vindictive side you mentioned coming out, but I hope she was kind of pissed.”

Once again, Duncan got quiet. He studied Callie, who seemed to calm down with the happy resolution to his Natasha story. Still, she kept quiet, which felt odd to him, as he’d gotten used to her constant interruptions.

“Well anyway,” he resumed his story, “after … all that, I just kept wandering in this general direction. I wasn’t really sure where I was going until I got here, but when I saw the main door of the apartment building open, I went ahead and let myself in.

“The guy who used to live in the apartment next to yours was moving out and had his door propped open, so I snuck in to scavenge for food, found a whole in the wall, and that pretty much takes us to now.”

Callie’s eyes went wide.

“But that guy moved out more than a month ago!” she said. “I only saw signs that you were hanging out here, like, a week ago.

“Are you saying you’ve been in the walls this whole time?”

Duncan nodded.

“I’ve been spending most of my time scouting,” he said. “The insides of these walls connect to a lot of the other apartments in the building, so I wanted to make sure the person I reached out to wasn’t another psycho.

“Once I picked you, I tried to leave little signs that I was around. I wanted to see your reaction before I came out, or at least that’s what I told myself.

“Honestly, it was really just an excuse to put it off. I’ve been sweating this for a while now.”

Callie picked her head up from her resting hands, tilting her head slightly to the side.

“You picked me?” she asked. “And you’re saying that all that stuff I noticed over the past week, you’ve been doing that on purpose?”

Grinning, Duncan gave Callie a thumbs up.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “Of course, being like this for so long, I somehow overlooked the fact that there’s no way anyone would have known that someone my size even exists, let alone is fucking with them.”

Callie lowered her head back atop her knuckles.

“Well, despite that, I’m still flattered,” she said. “But what was so special about me?

“Or was everyone else around here just super creepy?”

The giant woman’s last question got a chuckle out of Duncan. After taking a minute to recollect himself, he answered the more relevant of her questions.

“You’re almost too nice, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and you’re a little desperate,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Desperate about what I don’t know, but I kind of get the feeling that you can relate to someone like me, even if my desperate isn’t quite the same as yours.”

Callie nodded thoughtfully as Duncan explained his rationale for revealing himself to her. She kept quiet at first, with Duncan waiting patiently for her to process the information.

“So now that we’ve sorted all that out, I’m guessin’ that you want me to get you some help, right?” she asked. “So you can get back to normal?”

Duncan frowned at the suggestion.

“Not at all, actually,” he said. “I mean, where would I even go? I doubt any hospital has seen something like this before, and seeing as how no one has ever heard of people shrinking before, this is either something new to science or something scientists are trying to keep under wraps.

“Either way, I don’t like what that would mean for me if I went to a lab for help.”

Callie stared at him incredulously.

“Then why do all this?” she asked. “Why do you need me at all?’

Doing his best to give a casual shrug, Duncan hoped that Callie’s massive eyes wouldn’t catch the lump in his throat as he swallowed nervously.

“I thought it might be nice to have a place to go if things get … difficult with some of the other tenants in the building,” he said. “It might also be nice to have a place to scavenge where I don’t have to worry about being mistaken for a mouse or bug.”

But Duncan couldn’t bring himself to admit the real reason for seeking someone out. He wasn’t sure if it was out of pride or fear that he kept to himself that all he really needed from Callie was another person to talk to once in a while, if only to remind him that he’s still human.

“Anyway, if that works for you, I wouldn’t be in your hair too much,” he said. “I’m not trying to burden you with my problems or anything.”

Callie regarding Duncan with a look on her face that he wasn’t sure how to read, perhaps a mixture of curiosity, disbelief, and deep thought.

“That’s totally fine,” she said flatly. “Happy to help.”

Unsure of what was going through his giant hostess’ mind, Duncan decided to take the opportunity to excuse himself.

“Okay, well, good talk then, I guess,” he said. “And speaking of not being in your hair too much, I’m sure you’ve got a lot going on, so I should leave you to it.

“Thanks for helping me out, and have a good night!”

Duncan turned his back and started walking toward the edge of the table facing the hole in the wall. While he had gotten a bit of a weird vibe from Callie at the end there, he felt like things had gone pretty well. Maybe his concerns had been for nothing. Maybe things were finally starting to ...

“Hey, hold up a sec,” Callie called out, breaking his train of thought.

Duncan stopped dead in his tracks, attempting unsuccessfully to flush a sudden sense of dread from his gut with a quiet sigh.

Here it comes, he thought.

Internally, Duncan was kicking himself for revealing so much of his resourcefulness to this girl. From what he had seen in the past week, it was clear that she was smarter than his previous two captors, despite being a bit younger. After telling her his story, she would surely take extra precautions if she decided to capture him as well.

For a brief moment, he thought about making a break for it, irrational though it would be to do so. He almost laughed aloud as he caught a glimpse of his hole, the closest escape route. He would never make it, not before Callie simply reached out and grabbed him before his feet even reached the table’s edge.

No, whatever came next, Duncan would have to lean into it, at least for now.

“What’s up?” he asked as casually as he could, turning around slowly as he spoke.

Callie lifted her chin from her knuckles, her hands reaching for her lower back as her shoulder blades brushed against the back of her chair. Her fingers massaged her tailbone as her back arched, inadvertently thrusting her bulbous breasts forward.

“Actually,” she said hesitantly, flashing Duncan a nervous smile as she straightened her upper body, “would it be okay i-if … if I picked you up? It was getting a little uncomfortable leaning down like that, and like I said before, it can be kinda hard to hear you from up here sometimes.”

For Duncan, there was nothing okay about being picked up by a giant. As far as he could tell, being lifted in a giant fist was nothing more than a power trip for the women of his new life, a chance to show him just how pathetic he truly was now.

Still, it wasn’t as though he actually had a choice, right?

Heh, hands to herself, Duncan thought. I’m an idiot.

“Sure,” he yelled, secretly hoping that his voice didn’t reach the giantess.

But Callie’s nervous grin quickly curled into a genuine one at his answer, her top row of teeth glistening from between her slightly parted lips. As her hands returned to the table, her left settled in front of her while her right stretched toward Duncan, not even needing to fully extend to reach him.

He fought the urge to step back from the coming fingertips, also keeping his arms straight and at his sides as he cringed in anxious anticipation. He had learned early on that giants frowned upon him trying to keep his arms free in their grasp, preferring him to struggle feebly against the might of their grip.

But Callie’s pink-laced fingernails stopped just short of Duncan. Instead of encircling him eagerly, he looked on in surprise as the giant woman’s hand flipped slowly, upturning to expose her palm to him as a light rapping signaled that her knuckles had touched down on the tabletop. The thickness of her fingertips reached the middle of his shins.

At first, Duncan just stared at the waiting platform laid out before him.

Well, this is new, he thought.

Moving his eyes away from the hand in front of him, Duncan looked up to see Callie still smiling brightly as she waited patiently for him to board. His gaze locked with hers, he raised his right foot cautiously toward her middle finger. Before setting it down, however, he retracted the step.

Not entirely sure on the rules of etiquette for stepping into a woman’s palm, he removed his shoes and socks, setting them to the side. Callie shot him a quizzical look.

“There’s a lot of gunk and … other stuff in the walls,” Duncan shouted to her. “I figured you didn’t want that stuff on you.”

The giantess nodded thoughtfully.

“Appreciate it,” she said.

Duncan stepped into Callie’s hand. An involuntary shiver struck the giant woman as his tiny toes pressed upon her skin for the first time, the quiver flowing from her shoulders to her fingertips and causing the tiny man to stumble, though he maintained his balance after a brief wobbling passed through his legs.

“Sorry,” she said, cringing slightly. “I just didn’t expect you to feel like … well, like that!”

Duncan looked up to respond to the giantess, resuming his pace while speaking. His feet sank slightly into the flesh of her middle and index fingers as he gingerly walked their respective lengths, a foot traveling down each slender digit.

“And what exactly does that feel like?” he asked with a smirk, happy to seize even the smallest advantage against the embarrassed giant now holding him in the palm of her hand.

Staring down at Duncan as he reached the center of her palm, Callie attempted vainly to hide said embarrassment.

“I-I don’t know,” she answered shyly, her face turning a light shade of red. “Like, electric, I guess? It’s kinda intense.

“Anyway, changing the subject ...”

Slowly, Callie lifted her hand and its small passenger from the tabletop. Despite her best effort, Duncan struggled to stay on his feet. He fell on his butt as the momentum of his ascent ceased with him just below her button nose and roughly a foot away from her awed countenance.

He found himself studied by a pair of hazel eyes larger than his head. Over the edge of her palm, he could see the titaness flash a smug smirk of her own at regaining the upper hand, before her face took on a gentle yet serious look.

“I just wanted to let you know that you don’t have to do this alone anymore,” she said softly. “You were just sizing up if you could make it back to your little hole before I grabbed you, right? Well, you never had to worry about that, because I wouldn’t have tried to stop you. Actually, if you want, I can just carry you over there and save you some time. Then I can go back to leaving you food or pretending you don’t exist or whatever you want me to do.”

Callie lifted her gaze from the little man sitting in her hand as she stared vacantly at the small hole. For his part, Duncan continued to listen silently, still deciding what to make of her words as he returned to his feet.

“But I wouldn’t feel good about it,” she said. “And not just because I’d be worried. Although yeah, I’d be pretty worried about you if I knew you were around but couldn’t see you. I know you don’t need me to tell you this, but there’s a lot of trouble you can get into at your size, and I think I’d always be wondering if you were okay.”

Still looking over, rather than at, Duncan, Callie’s fingers absently began to curl inward. Before he could react, the tips of her ring and index fingers each picked a shoulder on which to settle. With the slightest bit of pressure, the fingertips began rubbing with gentle precision. Her middle finger soon joined in, massaging between his shoulder blades in slow, circular swirls.

“It’s because you’re right about me,” she said. “I do feel desperate.”

Callie looked down on the little man with a sad smile. He opened his mouth, whether to protest being fondled or contribute to the conversation he wasn’t sure, but it was all he could do to stifle a pleasurable moan from coming out instead. This didn’t go unnoticed by the giantess, who did her best to hold back a small chuckle before continuing.

“I think I’m about to fail outta school,” she said. “It’s only one class, but I’d have to go an extra semester, and I don’t have the money to do that. I mean, fuck, I don’t know if I have the money to make rent next month.”

Callie paused for a moment to take a slow, deep breath.

“Some asshole wants to screw me over and ruin my fuckin’ life, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “I’m gonna be in debt the rest of my life with nothing to show for it. I’ll just end up another 40-something slut sales girl still working at some out-of-date boutique and hitting on guys, like, half my age.”

There was a sense of sorrow in the words of the giantess that pulled Duncan from the calming lull of his massage. Despite any reservations he might have still held about the girl, he was compelled to ease that pain in her voice.

“Uh, you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself, don’t you think?” he asked. “Aren’t you overstressing a bit?”

Callie hesitated for a moment, carefully considering what to say next.

“That’s probably right,” she said sadly. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been stressing out about this for months now. The people that want to help me, like my parents, think I’m an idiot who did this to myself, and they can’t do anything for me anyway. And the one person who could actually help me is the one who put in this spot. I’m in this alone. No one’s coming to help me out.

“And as much as I hate to admit it, that’s all I really want: just someone to show up and say, ‘Here, have some help.’”

Callie’s fingers stopped their massage, flattening back out with the rest of her hand. She raised Duncan level with her eyes.

“Then I met you, and I realized that I don’t have it so bad,” she said. “I feel so guilty for thinking things were hard for me.

“But I also realized that I can be that person for you, someone who actually needs help. I can’t do anything about my shitty life, but I can help you. And I want to.

“It would mean a lot to me if you’d let me.”

Duncan wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t doubt Callie’s sincerity, but there were a lot of factors to consider before making any sort of decision.

What exactly does she mean by help? he thought. Obviously I can’t agree to anything without ...

“Okay,” he said before he realized it.

Duncan wanted to clasp his hand over his mouth and take the word back. Did he really just say that? Apparently, there was a part of him that was ready to trust this girl, but it’s not as though he hadn’t been fooled before. He needed to be more careful this time. He had to …

Pulling himself from his thoughts, he glanced at the giant face in front of him. Joy radiated from its countenance, headlined by a grin wider than he was. The tiny man couldn’t help but smile back at the sight.

Fuck it, Duncan thought.

“Are you serious?!” Callie asked excitedly. “I didn’t think you’d actually want my help, especially with everything those bitches did to you. Like, you have no idea how happy I am right now!

“We can be, like, roomies!”

Roomies? Duncan thought as he chuckled lightly at Callie’s excitement. Well, I guess I could think of worse ways that this could have played out.

As the colossal girl’s mood settled, she gave Duncan a semi-serious look.

“Full disclosure, I didn’t really need to pick you up to hear you,” she said apologetically. “Like, you for real do sound kinda quiet when I’m sitting up all the way, but I can still make out what you’re saying just fine, even if you don’t yell.

“It’s just that, well, I really, really, really wanted to pick you up, but I didn’t think you’d let me if I didn’t have a good excuse. Sorry.”

Duncan felt like he should have been annoyed, but he wasn’t. In fact, just Callie saying she was worried that he wouldn’t let her pick him up went a long way toward removing whatever doubts about her that were still lingering in his mind.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

A sigh of relief escaped Callie’s lips.

“Awesome!” she said. “I figured if we’re gonna be roommates, it’s best to keep things honest between us, ya know?”

Callie started sniffing the air around Duncan.

“Speaking of, not to be rude, but have you thought about maybe takin’ a bath or something?” she asked. “Not that you’ve had the chance ‘til now, but you look, and smell, like you could really use one!”

Duncan was too excited at the prospect of a bath to even feign an attempt at indigence at Callie’s critques.

“Yeah, that sounds great!” he said. “God, it’s been so long since I’ve been able to clean myself proper.”

Without warning, Callie’s other hand approached Duncan. Rather than grab him however, it also turned palm up as both hands came together. The two hands took on a bowl formation as Duncan slipped down to the bottom, though he managed to keep his feet, one resting on either palm.

“There, that should be a safer way to travel,” Callie giggled. “Now, to the bathroom!”

Duncan saw the world around him blur as Callie began to walk, her speed making it hard for him to discern his surroundings. This wasn’t the first time he had been carried by giants, but, unfortunately for him, it was the first time he was able to stand freely at the same time.

By Callie’s third step, he lost his balance, faceplanting into the center segment of her right pinkie finger. She took another step as he tried to push himself up, it’s impact being enough to make him abandon the effort and instinctively hug her pinkie for dear life.

“Huh?” Callie said, finally looking down and taking notice of Duncan’s predicament.

The little man could feel his face burning with embarrassment as he heard her laugh lightly overhead.

“This definitely isn’t my best moment,” he said with a nervous laugh, releasing his grip but keeping his back to her. “I guess that was kind of pathetic, huh?”

Duncan finally braved a look at Callie’s face, prepared to accept the smugness most certainly awaiting him there. Instead, he was met by her sweet, innocent smile.

“Nah, don’t worry about it,” she said. “We just gotta get used to each other is all.

“But we’ll get there.”

After receiving an uncertain, almost shy nod from Duncan after he regained his footing, Callie resumed her stride. However, the puny passenger noticed that the pace of their travel had become much more leisurely. Despite the world around him still whizzing by, it was obvious to him that the gargantuan girl had significantly slowed her steps.

The pair made their way beyond the invisible divide separating the kitchen from the apartment’s living room, a heavy layer of tacky dark purple shag carpet meeting linoleum serving as the only line of demarcation between the two rooms. They passed through the living space and traversed a short hallway before finding the bathroom.

The unapologetic smacks of Callie’s bare feet slapping against the tiled bathroom floor reverberated loudly around the narrow room as she took the few short steps to cover the distance between the doorway and the vanity.

Staring into the mirror above the sink, Duncan noticed that his grime-covered face barely managed to poke over the giant woman’s slightly curled fingers, her igloo-sized breasts dwarfing him at his back. He gave a defeated sigh. It had been a while since he had seen such a direct reminder of just how small he had become.

The ride down to the vanity countertop proved to be more smooth than Duncan’s earlier ascent, perhaps due to both of Callie’s hands being involved in gently lowering him back to more solid ground. He hopped off of her fingertips, the coldness of worn cultured marble assaulting the bottoms of his feet upon landing.

“Alright,” Callie said as she contemplatively looked around the room. “The tub is definitely too big for you, so I just need to find ...

“Hold up! I got it!”

The giant blonde hastily retreated from the bathroom, leaving Duncan stranded on the vanity. He wasn’t left alone long enough to give much thought to his situation, however, as she bounded back into the room less than a minute later, a small rectangular Tupperware container and a wash rag in her hands and a beaming grin on her face.

That grin turned into a slight frown after she set the container next to him.

“Oh, the edge is still a little taller than you,” Callie said, sounding a bit disappointed. “Sorry, but I think this is the best I can do for a tub for now.”

Duncan shot her a reassuring smirk.

“It beats the hell out of showering with the drips from the leaky pipe under your neighbor’s kitchen sink,” he said half-jokingly. “Seriously, this is more than good enough, and I really appreciate it.”

Callie said nothing in response, simply nodding as she set the rag down, reached for the vanity’s sink, and turned on the faucet. After testing the water temperature with her index finger, she quickly filled the container half way and placed it back down next to Duncan.

He reached overhead with both hands and grabbed the top of the container, pulling himself up as his right foot pushed off against the side for a boost. Balancing his midsection against the edge, he leaned down and was just able to touch the water with the tips of his fingers.

“The water feels great!” Duncan said as he let himself fall feet-first back onto the vanity.

Callie looked down on the little man in surprise.

“I guess you don’t need my help gettin’ in then?” she asked.

Duncan shook his head.

“I should be good from here,” he said.

Duncan watched as Callie grabbed two bottles from the nearby bathtub, one body wash and the other shampoo. She carefully squirted a small dab of each along the top edge of the container.

Then she reached for the mirror hovering far above him, pulling it open to reveal a massive cabinet hiding behind it. She pulled something he couldn’t make out from below from the cavernous storage area before addressing him once again.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m gonna go figure out some sorta bed for you.

“I’ll be back in about 20 minutes to see if you’re done.”

Callie exited the room, her feet no less noisy as she left. Duncan began to undress, looking forward to enjoying the closest thing to a real bath he had experienced in six months.

********

Callie wasted no time in heading for her bedroom closet. She tossed the small bag of cotton balls she had grabbed from the bathroom onto her bed before getting on her knees and starting to dig through the closet.

Come on, she thought. I gotta have something that’ll work in here.

Thinking back on the past hour or so, Callie was still struggling to comprehend the situation. She didn’t understand how a person could just shrink for, like, no reason. She didn’t understand how people could be as cruel as the women her new roommate had come across after he shrank.

Most of all, she didn’t understand how he was still alive or how he was able to function like everything was fine.

If she had gone through half of the stuff he described to her in his story, Callie was sure she would be reduced to a crying mess, balled up in the fetal position, at all times. What’s worse, she was sure that he had left out some of the rougher details of his journey.

She had plenty of questions after Duncan had finished telling his tale, but the truth was that she was too afraid to ask them. She wasn’t sure if she could handle the reality of what his ex had actually done to him, how he had managed to feed himself for those six months, or even where he had slept each night.

Or where exactly he’s gonna to sleep here, Callie mentally noted. He’s gonna to need …

She stopped mid-thought as her eyes came across an old gray shoe box. She picked it up, its lack of weight conveying emptiness. Opening up the box, she gave its interior a quick sniff, not detecting any stench coming from within.

Callie found herself wondering if Duncan would be insulted at her offering a shoe box as a temporary room. Would it be yet another reminder of how tiny he is. She had noticed that he seemed depressed when he saw the reflection of himself in her hands earlier, even if he only showed it for a brief moment.

It’ll have to do for now, she concluded. It’s the best I got right now, and we can always find something better later.

Having made a decision, Callie started to gather the other materials she needed to complete Duncan’s makeshift shelter.

********

Callie knocked on the bathroom door twice before slowly turning the doorknob. Closing her eyes and covering them with her free hand, she pushed the door slightly ajar and poked her head through the crack.

“You done yet?” she asked.

Listening closely, Callie could barely hear a faint echo in the distance.

“Yeah, you can open your eyes if you want,” Duncan shouted.

Callie dropped her hand and opened her eyes as she stepped into the bathroom. She spotted Duncan standing beside the container, dressed only in damp boxer shorts. It felt a bit awkward, and a part of her wanted her eyes to close once again, but the rest of her refused to listen.

The first thing to stand out to her was how built he was. That’s not to say he had muscles bulging all over his body, but he was certainly more toned than she would have expected, with a six-pack covering his abs and the solid muscles of his arms and legs suddenly more apparent without the distraction of his tattered clothing.

The second thing she noticed were the scars.

As Callie closed the distance between them, she could see the calling cards of several cuts and scrapes long healed but never forgotten. None were as prominent as the one left by Bigsby, but his torso and upper legs were dressed in light scarring, as well as some bruising.

As she reached the vanity, she was at a loss for words. Instead of staring at him, she focused on the stillness of the dark brown, almost mud-like bathwater in the Tupperware container.

“So I decided to clean my clothes while I was at it,” Duncan explained. “I didn’t see the point of cleaning myself and putting those ratty things back on. I left my shirt and shorts out to dry over there and dried off my boxers as best I could.”

Callie looked a few inches to the right of Duncan to see his mostly shredded shirt and ripped up shorts, sopping wet, laid out neatly on the countertop. She tried to focus on them rather than him but couldn’t help but steal another glance at him.

Without the dirt and grime covering his body, as well as his beard and hair being less raggedy, she felt like she could get a better sense of his age, which looked to be just a bit older than her own. She guessed that Duncan was somewhere in his mid-twenties at most.

“Like yeah, that totally makes sense,” Callie said, swiftly averting her eyes and looking to change the subject. “So, uh, what do you want to do now?”

Duncan stretched his arms over his head and let out a soft yawn.

“I was actually thinking of getting some sleep,” he said. “I know its not that late, but I haven’t really had a good night’s sleep in a while, and I’m pretty worn down right now.”

Eager to get out of the uncomfortable situation, Callie hastily lowered her hands for Duncan.

“Y-yeah, no problem!” she said. “Come on!”

This time, Duncan was much faster to climb into her hands, his growing trust melting Callie’s heart. Not to mention the warm yet almost tingly sensation of his little bare feet and tiny toes against her palms. She fought off a pleasurable shiver as he walked, unsure if she wanted her teeny traveler to know just how much she enjoyed holding him.

As she left the bathroom at a more accommodating speed, she saw that Duncan was also handling the trip noticeably better than the previous one. She felt a small smile creep across her lips.

The trek to her bedroom was a short one, it being directly across the hall from the bathroom. Callie walked to the dresser near the foot of her bed and set Duncan down in front of the shoe box from earlier.

“I figured you’d want some privacy, so I gave you your own room!” Callie beamed. “The door’s right over here.”

She pointed to the middle of one of the longer sides of the box. There, carved from the base to roughly three inches upward, was the “door.” She had cut the opening on three sides, leaving one longer side intact to act as a door hinge.

Cautiously, Duncan pushed the door open, stepping into the box. Callie, being curious about his reaction, carefully lifted the lid from the box. He didn’t acknowledge the removal of his ceiling, however, as he kept his eyes on the flattened ball of fabric, which showed the barest hint of the fluffiness it was hiding underneath, in a corner of the otherwise bare room.

“I didn’t think the cotton would be comfortable to sleep on by itself, so I cut a piece of bed sheet and wrapped it up,” she said. “I really tried to find ways to make this feel homey, but I didn’t have a lot of stuff around for that.

“And I know it’s just a shoe box, but I promise we’ll find …”

Callie stopped herself as Duncan raised a hand and looked over the rim of the box toward her.

“Like I said before, I was sleeping in a hole in the wall for the last month, so this is great, really,” he said. “Thank you.”

Duncan then approached the makeshift bed and fell back-first onto it, letting out a relaxing sigh as he landed.

“Anytime!” Callie said. “I’ll let you get your sleep now. Goodnight!”

Duncan gave a small wave, his eyes already closed as his body settled into a more comfortable position. Callie put the lid back on top of the box and left the room. Heading back down the hallway, her thoughts centered on the tiny man sleeping in a box by the foot of her bed.

Someone actually believes in me, Callie mused. Somebody thinks I’m not worthless.

And I’m gonna prove him right!

She reached the door and put on a pair of sandals she had left waiting there. Grabbing her purse from a nearby end table in the living room, she left the apartment with a newfound sense of determination.

Callie had a lot of work to do.

The sound of the front door slamming echoed through the house, waking Duncan from his afternoon nap.

She’s finally back, he thought.

Duncan rolled over on the folded-up handkerchief that was his bed, the rough edges of the cheap hamster bedding beneath jabbing at his left side. He winced just a bit, but he was starting to get used to it. After three days at this size, he was almost frightened by how quickly he had adapted to living in a cage.

Well, other than the smell, that is.

He had designated the corner he would use to relieve himself pretty early on. But by the middle of the second day in his new home, he found that not even burying his waste in untouched bedding was enough to suppress the stench. Maybe it would work if they had used higher-quality bedding, but Kristie had insisted that it wasn’t worth the added expense.

“Hey D, what’s up?” a voice came from the hallway just outside the bedroom door. “Well, other than everything for you.”

Duncan just sighed at the comment.

Everyday with that fucking joke, he laughed to himself. She could at least come up with some new material.

A woman looking of Korean descent stepped through the bedroom door, her straight black hair tied up in a lengthy pony tail. She kicked off a pair of black high heels, sending them scattering about the floor. She glanced at the cage with a smile before heading to her dresser across the room.

“Not much, babe, like usual,” Duncan said, returning his girlfriend’s smile despite her back already being turned. “How was your day?”

By the time the question came, Kristie had already stripped out of her pencil skirt, blouse, and pantyhose and was slipping on a pair of jean shorts and a worn out Green Day t-shirt. Once she had completed her transition into more comfortable clothing, she made her way to the cage, beginning her answer to his question along the way.

Kristie went on about her workday, focusing mostly on office gossip and that bitch Tammy Smithers. Duncan had never met Tammy, or anyone at the office where Kristie worked for that matter, but she sure sounded like a bitch whenever Kristie talked about her. And, being a good boyfriend, he felt compelled to side with his girl.

Finally, after 15 minutes or so, Duncan finally found an opening in the conversation.

“Hey babe, sorry to interrupt, but do you think maybe we can go ahead and change the bedding today?” he asked. “It’s really starting to stink in here.”

Kristie leaned over the cage and sniffed twice.

“Nah, I don’t smell anything, so it should be good,” she said. “Besides, when I had a hamster as a kid, I only changed this stuff once a week.”

Duncan bit his tongue. He wasn’t a hamster, and even they usually got their bedding changed more than once a week. Not to mention the fact that his nose was much closer to the smell than hers. But he knew that there was no point in arguing with her when she got like this. He would just have to suck it up and deal with it.

But maybe a change in subject would bring about a better result.

“And while we’re talking about the cage, do you really think the padlock is necessary?” Duncan asked.

Kristie grabbed the padlock attached to the latch on the cage’s lone door, looking at it absently as she rattled it against the bars, causing him to take a few steps back.

“I told you, I can’t have you getting out. There’s too many bad things that can happen to you at that size, D,” she said. “I still have no idea how you managed to get that latch open on your own.”

Duncan lowered his head.

“I just needed to get out of here for a bit,” he said quietly. “Being in here so much just gets to me sometimes.”

Kristie’s incisors pressed into the full lower lip, their brightness made all the more apparent by her dark red shade of lipstick.

“If I’m being totally honest,” she said, “you in that cage—the hottest you’ve ever been.”

Duncan couldn’t stop his eyes from rolling.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, but that stuff is the last thing on my mind right now,” he said, gesturing to himself. “I really need to figure out what to do about this before I worry about anything else.”

Kristie let loose a condescending chuckle.

“Oh, just let me worry about that stuff, D,” she said. “That’s more of a big person thing to take on. I mean, what do you think tiny little you is going to figure out at that size, anyway?”

It hurt, but Duncan knew she was right. He had always loved that blatant honesty of hers, even when he hated it. It was how he knew he could always trust her.

Besides, he couldn’t exactly argue with her. There was no way he could possibly survive on his own at this size, let alone figure out how to fix it.

“You’re right, babe,” he answered, hesitating before bringing up his next question. “I know we agreed on no hospitals or anything like that, but have you thought of anyone else we might reach out to?”

Kristie glared at him through the bars of his cage.

“And who exactly do you want me to call?” she sneered. “Maybe your family … oh wait, what family? You haven’t talked to the Brenadines since high school, right?”

Duncan, shoulders slumped, felt crestfallen by the truth behind Kristie’s words.

“It’s not like they were your real family anyway,” she continued. “And they haven’t exactly been busting your door down to talk to you either. Heh, they don’t even know where your door is!”

Kristie’s face broke into a dark grin as she saw the effect her words were having on Duncan.

“Ooh, I know,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “How about I just give Ms. Icy Bitch a call and let her know why you haven’t been to work the last few days. Maybe she’ll even take you in. Would you like that, being your boss’ pet?”

The prospect of being the property of Monica Shale, control-freak extraordinaire, was a terrifying one for Duncan. He could only shake his head vigorously as he sat down, staring at his knees as he brought them into his chest.

Kristie’s face softened as she studied her belittled boyfriend, a mixture of sympathy and regret taking the place of the gleeful spite it wore seconds before.

“Come on, now,” she said. “You know I don’t like being like this, but I need you to understand, and I mean really understand, that I’m all you have, same as always.”

Kristie managed to barely squeeze her right index finger between the meshed bars of the cage, stretching it just far enough for the tip to raise Duncan’s chin and make eye contact with the puny prisoner.

“So no more complaining, alright?” she said. “And definitely no more of this ‘looking for someone else to take care of you’ bullshit. All this bitching from you makes me think you don’t appreciate me.”

Duncan found himself lost in the dim gray iris of one of Kristie’s big almond-shaped eyes as she leaned in for a closer look at him. A feeling of warm comfort washed over him, the vibrant passion behind her stare reminding him of why he feel in love with the gargantuan girl.

Yeah, she can come off like a jerk sometimes, he thought, but it’s just her feelings coming on too strong. She doesn’t mean anything by it.

As Duncan continued to reflect on Kristie’s words, he started to wonder if maybe she was right. Maybe he was being ungrateful. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to survive the outside world on his own like this! How could he have been such an asshole to not appreciate what his loving girlfriend had done for him, to even suggest that he should trust someone else besides just her?

After all, she was the only person in the world that he could trust.

“Hmm,” Kristie said, breaking Duncan from his thoughts. “Things have been pretty stressful for us these lately. Maybe we just need to take the edge off, huh?”

Kristie withdrew her finger from the cage, lowering her hand below the desk. It rose back above the wooden horizon a few seconds later, a small key clenched between its fingers. She unlocked the padlock on the cage door, then opened the door itself and reached inside.

Duncan had barely returned to his feet by the time her hand was upon him. The soft flesh enveloped him entirely before he felt her pinkie maneuver under his feet and shove his head and shoulders through a small hole formed by her curved index finger and thumb. He quickly lifted his arms through the hole as well, but the finger and thumb spread apart, tucking his arms back into her fist as they came together once more.

The little man’s stomach lurched as Kristie hastily removed her prize from his cage and stood to her full height. As she began walking toward her bed, she dropped her arm to the side and let it sway with her eager stride. It was all Duncan could do to keep down the breadcrumbs his gargantuan girlfriend left in his food dish for him that morning, riding a wave of nausea as he swung with the pendulum-like movements.

With a squeal of delight, Kristie jumped onto her bed, stretching her legs down its length as her butt crashed into the plush comforter covering her mattress. Her back leaned into a stack of fluffy pillows resting along the bed’s oak headboard.

“Ah,” she sighed. “Much better. Now come hither.”

Before Duncan’s insides could recover from the impact of Kristie’s rough landing, his stomach turned over again as he was raised just in front of the rounded tip of her small nose. She stared down at him silently, her eyes alight with impish intent, that warmth he had found in them earlier completely absent.

He began to wonder if it had ever really been there or if it had been a lie from the start.

“Wh-what are you doing, babe?” he asked.

Kristie answered her little lover with a smug smirk.

“Something I’ve wanted to do since I turned around and found you tiny on my doorstep,” she answered. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it, too.”

The giantess adjusted her grip on Duncan, partially opening her fingers so that she had a clear view of his front. The tips of her fingers pressed firmly into his right side, while his left slid to just beneath the base of her thumb. While he didn’t know how she planned to go about it, he recognized the look in her eyes and the tone in her voice.

Kristie wanted to fuck.

This was the last thing Duncan needed. He was in no condition, physically or mentally, for sex at the moment. He knew he had to put a stop to this and do it quickly.

“Like I said before, I’m just not feeling it right now. Sex, I mean,” he said. “I-I’m still getting used to being like ... well, like this. Maybe we can try some other time?”

Kristie’s smirk expanded into a full-blown Cheshire Cat grin. Her free hand came into view as her fingers gripped the right pantleg of Duncan’s shorts and slowly pulled them down his tiny legs. Discarding the shorts on the bed, the fingers came back for his boxer shorts.

Duncan began to squirm and kick his legs as best he could, but his sides only dug deeper into the quicksand-like fingertips holding him in place as their grip tightened around him. He kept fighting nonetheless, anger over being ignored overtaking his nerves in the heat of the moment.

“What the fuck, Kristie?!” he shouted. “Give me my damn shorts back! I already told you I’m not ready yet!”

The playful mischief faded from Kristie's face, replaced by stern, serious features. Duncan stopped fighting, a chill running through his soul as his girlfriend's eyebrows shifted inward in annoyance.

"Duncan," she said. "We're doing this. Whether you have fun or pout about it is up to you."

Duncan stopped struggling. He opened his mouth to speak but he simply couldn't find the right words. Or any words, for that matter. It was all he could do to keep his body's terrified quivering from overtaking him entirely.

He wouldn't let her see his fear.

After a moment of silence shared between the two, Kristie flashed an arrogant smile. If she noticed the quaking emanating from the little naked man trapped in her fingers, she wasn't acknowledging it.

"Good," she said in a perky voice. "Now that that's all worked out, it's time to play!"

With careless haste, Kristie removed Duncan’s shirt and boxers, leaving the little man in her hand completely naked. Pursing her lips together in concentration, her thumb glided over Duncan's torso, touching down at his crotch. He noticed how the pad of the pudgy digit dwarfed his waistline as it began to rub against the limp shaft of his cock.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered in tone that reminded Duncan of someone trying to start a stalling vehicle. “Wake up, buddy.”

Duncan tried to think of anything other than the stimulation at his crotch. The feeling of betrayal at his gigantic girlfriend violating him, as well as the accompanying embarrassment, was enough to keep him soft. At first. However, once she increased the pace of her careless assault, friction won the day.

“Yes! Got it!” she said.

Kristie ignored the pained groans her rough play was eliciting out of the tiny toy in her fingers. Feeling him at full mast, she stopped rubbing his shaft, her thumb finding its way to his tip. With the flick of a thumb, she moved his erection up and down, back and forth, and in circles.

"Hey, this is pretty fun!" she said. "It's sorta like working a Joy-Con stick. Only waaaay smaller."

Kristie was merciless as she traced random shapes and designs with Duncan’s hard cock.

"St-stop," he said, barely a whisper.

Surprisingly, Kristie did.

“That’s enough teasing, I suppose,” she said. “It’s time to take care of this teeny tiny D in my hand.”

Laughing at her own joke, Kristie moved her free hand toward Duncan’s now fully erect and fully sore penis. The pads of her thumb and index finger swallowed his elongated shaft. She started grinding them together, tugging up and down on it with random yanks.

Overwhelmed by an intense blend of pleasure and pain, he tried to push her fingers away, forgetting that his arms were pinned to his sides. He knew it would have been useless anyway, but he couldn’t accept that this was happening to him, that he could do nothing to stop it, that his girlfriend was the one doing this to him. Could he even call her that anymore?

Kristie’s giggling from above answered that question for him. As she alternated the speed of her rubbing fingertips, slowing down and speeding up the pace on a whim, he realized that she was truly enjoying this. This was fun for her. She was stripping what little dignity he had left and reminding him that he was nothing now, all for nothing more than a game.

And the worst part was that, the longer this went on, the more he was losing himself in his disgusting lust.

Just as Duncan was about to finish, the fingers parted, leaving him both relieved and frustrated. She looked down on him, grinning wildly as he calmed down. He hadn’t realized how hard or fast he had been breathing, but now he noticed his lungs greedily sucking in air. And while he remained hard, he could feel that he was no longer ready to burst after a few minutes of waiting.

Without a word, Kristie raised him to her lips. She must have felt him trying to free his arms earlier, because she loosened her hold just enough for him to move them again. Then she sandwiched his cock between those thick lips. That his head didn’t even reach the inside of her mouth was yet another blow to the tiny man’s shattered ego.

But Duncan didn’t have time to worry about that. He took advantage of his newfound mobility, pushing, punching, and even pinching her top lip in an attempt to stop her. His efforts were rewarded with a closed-lipped laugh from his captor, his insides rattling violently at her voice alone.

Then came Kristie’s tongue. Parting the inside of her lips, it homed in on his cock almost instantly. The tip of the monstrous muscle slipped above his head and shaft then below them, all while oscillating at a merciless tempo, it’s rough bumps teasing and torturing him simultaneously as they grazed across his manhood at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings.

Please, Duncan failed to cry out, no longer certain what he was asking for.

Four parts Fear, three parts anger, five parts sadness, two part lust, and six parts guilt: Duncan forced down a bitter cocktail of overwhelming emotion, its ingredients mixing together to produce an intoxicating shame he had never felt before. He didn’t know what to do or say.

For a brief glimpse in time, he truly didn’t know if he wanted this to stop.

And it was only as he came between her lips that he truly realized that he was forever changed.

As Kristie pulled him away from her face to admire her handiwork, Duncan kept his head down, doing his best to conceal the silent tears flowing freely from his eyes. He couldn’t look at her anyway. In fact, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to face anyone ever again.

“Hey!” Kristie yelled, nearly deafening the tiny thing between her fingers. “Don’t be dozing off on me now, D. If I knew you were going to try and pull that shit, I would have went first.”

Unfortunately, looking down meant that Duncan was already staring at Kristie’s free hand working the button on her shorts. She arched her back and lifted her butt from the bed as she slid her shorts and black panties down her legs at the same time, kicking them off her ankles and over the side of the bed.

Then he glided over her upper body as her hand moved him over her firm, round breasts and taut stomach toward her trimmed pussy.

Kristie’s free hand pulled her lower lips apart to receive him, and Duncan could only scream hysterically for her to stop as he stared into the dark abyss waiting between them.

********

Callie cracked her bedroom door open and crept into the room, tailor’s tape measure in-hand. She placed as little weight into her steps as possible as she approached Duncan’s makeshift room. She had just returned to the apartment an hour after he went to bed, so she was sure he was asleep by now, and the last thing she wanted to do was wake him.

It was when she was halfway between the door and the shoe box that she first heard the screams.

Callie rushed over to Duncan’s box, flipping the lid open in a panic. She was surprised to see him still asleep, although he was twisting and turning on his cotton-ball mattress. He continued to scream, and now she could see that he was crying through closed eyelids as well.

She wasted no time nudging his back gently with her right index and middle fingers in an attempt to pull him out of what was clearly a terrible nightmare. After the first prod, she heard him mumble a single word between his terrified shrieks: Kristie.

Kristie, isn’t that his ex’s name? Callie wondered. What the fuck did that bitch do to him to make him scream like that?

It took more three pokes, the last one with just a tad more force behind it, before the little man’s torso shot up from the bed, his eyes wide open. The screaming didn’t stop, however, and he pushed himself back against the wall behind him. The violent movements also intensified, his body slamming into the two walls meeting at the nearest corner.

“Can’t breathe!” Duncan screamed between coughing fits. “Let me out!”

Her hand already in the box, Callie wasted no time in lifting him out of it. But her grip on him was forced to tighten as his thrashing didn’t stop. It took a few minutes of fruitless assurances that he was okay for her to realize that he was actually still asleep.

A part of her couldn’t help but enjoy the way Duncan’s body desperately squirmed in her fingers, completely restrained within her fist with minimal effort on her part. She tried to ignore that feeling, reminding herself that she was only holding him for his own safety and that she would never do this against his will.

Callie tried to force her thoughts back toward how she could best help Duncan, but she became distracted again when she felt his erection poking against the inside of her hand. Not only that, but she could tell that the front of his boxers were wet as well. The piss she understood, given how terrified he seemed to be, but why was he so hard? What was it about whatever it was he was seeing that could be remotely sexual, unless—

That’s not piss, she realized.

The pieces began to come together in Callie’s mind. Why Duncan was struggling so intensely. Why he was coughing so much. Why he was so hard despite obviously being terrorized by memories past. Even that faraway look he had on his face when he couldn’t bring himself to tell her about what he went through with that Kristie woman.

And just like that, Callie knew exactly what Duncan’s ex had done to him.

“How … how could she …” she stuttered, struggling to keep her emotions in check. “How could anyone …”

With a few deep breaths, Callie pushed down the upsetting emotions bubbling up inside her. She had to focus on calming the half-conscious tiny down before he hurt himself. She brought the hand holding him toward her chest, cupping it and sandwiching him between her palm and the top of her exposed left breast. Rocking her hips in a soothing rhythm, she lifted her index finger and rubbed his neck and upper back with its tip.

Still she could feel Duncan’s sleeping form struggling against her skin. Unsure what else to do, she began to sing in a hushed, melodic voice:

“Sometimes I get so sad.

Sometimes you just make me mad.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.

Sometimes I just won’t go.

Sometimes I can’t say no.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.

Sometimes days go speeding past.

Sometimes this one seems like the last.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.

It’s a sad and beautiful world.”

By the time Callie finished the song, Duncan’s eyes were closed again and his body was calm and still. She was slow to pull him away from her chest as she continued to sway gently to the tune still playing in her head. Finally, she willed herself to separate from him, holding him in her fist about a foot in front of her chest.

I guess this as good a time as any, she thought.

Callie opened her fingers, with Duncan laying against her exposed palm. She took the tailor’s tape measure in her free hand and rolled a portion of it out to measure his height, something she had been curious about since she first saw him on her kitchen counter earlier in the week.

Two and seven-eighths inches, she noted in her head. Shit, he’s, like, really, really small.

Callie manipulated Duncan’s body with her fingers as she took various measurements of his body, taking care not to disturb his sleep as she did so. She felt a bit guilty about handling him in such a way, as well as how much she found herself enjoying it, but she knew her intentions were pure and figured the end result would definitely be worth it.

After finishing with all the necessary measurements, she lowered her hand to his bed and carefully rolled him off her fingers and back onto it. She couldn’t help but smile down on him brightly as she watched him sleep peacefully for a few minutes before placing the lid back on the shoe box.

********

Duncan woke up feeling more refreshed than he had in a long time.

He sat up and stretched, then got out of bed. With no clothes to put on, he made his way through the shoe box door in his boxers. The first thing that he noticed was that Callie’s bed was already made.

Is she up already, Duncan asked himself. I mean, I guess I don’t know what time it is, but I’m surprised she was up before me when I went down first. Side note: Callie, get a damn alarm clock in your room like a normal person.

The next order of business was finding his way down. Looking down the front of the dresser, he determined that climbing down that way would be tricky but doable. Turning around, however, he found a much easier option in the form of a lamp.

It didn’t take Duncan long to climb down the lamp’s cord and make the short jump from the electrical outlet to the thinly carpeted floor. He silently gave thanks that most of the apartment didn’t share the living room’s “exotic” taste in carpeting. He hadn’t tried it yet, but he was pretty sure walking through that shag would be anything but fun.

A ten-minute brisk jog across the bedroom floor and down the hallway led him into that field of purple shag. As he worked his way through it, he looked into the kitchen, where he saw Callie sitting at the card table with her head laying atop it. On the side of her opposite him, he saw the top of a white building-sized object poking out from behind her head.

A thunderously loud, yet somehow still petite snore rained down from above as well, something Duncan couldn’t help but find cute despite its incredible volume.

He arrived at the nearest table leg after another five minutes of walking, the shag slowing his pace before reaching the kitchen tile. The legs of the table bent and curled inward midway up, their joints meeting near the table’s center.

Duncan began his climb, wrapping his arms as far around the closest leg as he could. While pulling himself up, he quickly realized that his bare skin gave him much more traction against the cold metal. Of course, it also became more painful as that exposed flesh stuck against the metal, but he concluded that the trade-off was worth it.

“Hey Duncan, remember when you used to be afraid of heights,” he laughed to himself, a habit he had picked up in the past half year. “Oh, you mean back when a four-foot fall wouldn’t kill me? No I don’t, Duncan, no I don’t.”

Duncan kept climbing until he reached the underside of the table itself. He had come to familiarize himself with the various slides and latches for the retractable legs over the past week. Using them to get to the edge of the table was never what he would call easy.

Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun with it.

Hand-over-hand, Duncan moved along one of the table slides, his legs dangling toward what he had no doubt would be a fatal drop roughly eighty feet below. But he moved with grace and confidence, swinging to build momentum as he let go and propelling himself to a latch a few feet in front of him. After grabbing the latch, he even did a couple pull-ups, showing off to no one in particular.

Back to normal size goal number two: Win America Ninja Warrior, he mused as he kept moving. Huh, maybe I should start a list. Although, I guess I wouldn’t be able to read it if I ever get back to normal.

Duncan halted his progress, hanging from a latch near the edge of the table. His last thought repeated in his head:

If I ever get back to normal.

For the first time since the first few days after shrinking, Duncan was able to actually ponder the possibility of returning to his old life. Most of the past six months had been about survival, and any passing thought he had about finding help and fixing his size was pushed away after Natasha turned on him.

But now, with the constant struggle to stay alive seemingly behind him, at least for the time being, he could start to think about if and how he might reclaim his old 5’9” height. As Duncan resumed his swinging toward the table’s edge, he exhaled a relaxing sigh, releasing months of stress in a single breath.

He finally made his way to the edge of the table, switching his grip on the nearby latch and rotating his body 180 degrees in order to grab the ledge and pull himself up.

Don’t get too comfortable here, Duncan told himself as he climbed onto the tabletop. This girl seems super nice, but you’ve been fooled before.

As his feet enjoyed finding solid ground again, he took in the sleeping giant to his left. He hadn’t noticed from the ground, but he could now see that she was wearing the same clothes she had on last night. She was using her left forearm as a pillow, and a relatively tiny pile of drool was pooled in front of her mouth.

Duncan was also able to figure out what that white structure was, despite Callie’s pretty face blocking the bottom half of it from view.

Is that a sewing machine? he asked himself. I wouldn’t have guessed that she would have one of those, let along know how to use it.

Turning his attention to the rest of the table, he noticed three sets of clothing, all scaled to his size, strewn about. The one closest to him was a white shorts and beige t-shirt combination. He walked over and picked up the shirt, which he determined was made from cotton fabric. It was pretty close to store quality, in his estimation.

Before he could move on to the shorts or the other articles of clothing, he heard Callie stirring behind him. He turned around in time to see her sit up.

“Duncan?” she said. “When did you get here?”

Duncan explained that he had just woken up about twenty minutes prior and that he made his way over after seeing her sitting at the table. He saw her eyes move from him to the shirt he was holding.

“So they don’t really make doll clothes in your size,” she said. “They must think there’s no market for toys like that. I’d say there’d be some interest, though. Like, you look like you’d be fun to play wi—”

Callie attempted to suck the words back into her mouth with a sharp gasp, slapping her right hand over her mouth to keep any other embarrassing words from finding their way out. Her shimmering copper eyes studied Duncan nervously from above as she tried to gauge his reaction to her degrading slip up.

Duncan knew alarm bells should have been going off in his head. The thought that Callie had even considered that he might be “fun to play with” should have been an unsettling one. The reality that she could, at any moment, simply pluck him off the table and do exactly that should have terrified him.

That’s why he couldn’t understand why he was smiling.

“Callie, what is all this?” he asked, electing to ignore the awkward situation entirely, instead focusing on all of the items sized to him on the table.

The giant-sized blonde’s relief was obvious as she dropped her hand from her lips, revealing that their pink gloss had started to fade. Her thin, slightly curved eyebrows relaxed as the tension left her face. The rosy blush glowing on her cheeks remained, however.

“That’s what I was saying,” she said, just a little faster than normal. “Last night, I was thinkin’ that you only had the one pair of clothes and those are all ripped and stuff. So like, I remembered that I still had my mom’s old sewing machine here, so I said to myself, ‘Self, you gotta help this man out,’ cuz that’s what roomies do for each other, right? Right. So anyway, I made a quick trip to the craft shop and picked up a few things and then I came back here and of course I got right to work and then I kinda got locked into what I was doin’ and …”

Callie paused her rant as she saw Duncan stretch his right arm toward her and put his right index finger straight up, palm side facing her.

“Wait,” he said, holding the finger in place for a few seconds before lowing it. “Okay, my brain’s all caught up. Go.”

The redness started to fade from her face, but she still had a meek, almost nervous look about her.

“I made you some clothes, although I passed out before I got to your boxers,” she said. “And I made a real bed for you. Well, as real as I could do.”

Duncan put on the shorts and shirt he had been examining before. They were so comfortable! He couldn’t believe she had put so much effort into this for him. How could she make something that looked and felt so good by hand?! How long did it take for her to get all the little details just right?

“Wait, did you say a bed?” he asked.

Callie bit her lower lip and nodded. She reached over a shopping bag Duncan hadn’t previously paid attention to, picking up a toy bed frame and setting it down in front of him. She repeated this procedure with something that looked a lot like a real mattress.

He could tell the frame had been altered, although he doubted the cut marks and tiny bits of dried glue were noticeable to someone Callie’s size. The middle had been cut out and glued back together to fit his proportions. The legs had also been cut evenly and glued to the feet so that he could crawl into and out of bed with no difficulty.

Normally not one to get worked up, Duncan surprised himself as he ran toward the mattress and leaped into the air, allowing himself to fall into it. His body sank just a little and the mattress even had a slight bounce to it. The balance between firm and soft was exactly how her preferred.

“This is a real mattress,” he said, unable to keep the excitement out his voice. “How the fuck did you make a real mattress?!”

Upon seeing Duncan’s reaction, Callie ditched the nervous expression, grinning from ear to ear. She happily told him how she used a combination of foam padding, cotton, a thin piece of plywood, and tiny springs she removed from several mechanical pencils to put the mattress together. She then cut out a patch of one of her bed sheets to cover it, using a paper clip beneath the mattress to hold it in place.

Duncan stared up at her in stunned silence. No one had ever done something like that for him before, devoted so much thought to something for him. He didn’t know how to react. All he knew was that he wouldn’t let himself cry, no matter how hard the tears were pushing against the backs of his eyes.

“Th-thank you,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”

Somehow, Callie’s smile got even bigger. She opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by a wind chime noise coming from her phone. She glanced down at it and the smile was gone.

“It’s 2:45 already?!” she exclaimed. “Shit, I’m gonna be late!”

Callie hurriedly rose from her seat and took two steps toward the door before turning around. She ran to the fridge and opened it, pulling out a package of lunch meat.

“This okay for lunch?” she asked.

Duncan nodded, and Callie set a piece of slice of the meat in front of him. She hastily made her way to the door, slipped on her sandals, said goodbye, and left, grabbing neither a textbook nor her backpack. He couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Maybe she wouldn’t need them?

He helped himself to a handful of lunch meat. Glancing into the living room, he saw a textbook laying on the coffee table in front of the couch, although he couldn’t make out what subject it was for from that far away. With nothing better to do, he made his way back down to the floor and headed for the table.

Duncan reached the top of the table in about twenty minutes’ time, as he traveled at a leisurely pace. He was in no rush. Climbing on top of the paperback textbook, he could see that it was of a crude design, obviously not put together by a major company. Then he saw the name of the book and felt his skin crawl:

Advanced Business and Statistical Analysis and You by Carlton Stillwell.

A sneer involuntarily overtook Duncan’s face.

That asshole is writing his own textbook now? he wondered. That’s so fucking typical of him. I bet it reads like shit, too.

Duncan stepped off the cover and grabbed its lower right corner, lifting it over his head and walking toward the spine of the book to open it. He read through the opening pages, using this method to turn them. It didn’t take long for him to conclude that the book did, in fact, read like shit. Stillwell always went out of his way to make his classes complicated in Duncan’s opinion, so he wasn’t surprised to see his book written in the same obtuse, confusing style.

After glancing through the first few pages, Duncan turned to a page that was saved with a folded piece of paper. With writing on both sides of the paper, he was able to see that it was the class syllabus. Curious, he unfolded it and looked it over, noticing that this was the class she was heading to now and that she had it on Mondays and Wednesdays as well.

So she has to deal with that piece of shit three days a week, he thought. Man, I feel really sorry fo—

The dots suddenly started to connect for Duncan. He remembered the times he had seen Callie come home, at about that very time, clearly disturbed, sometimes crying her eyes out. He thought back to his own experience with Professor Stillwell, reminding himself of the disgust and disdain he held for the man.

And just like that, Duncan knew exactly why Callie had such a hard time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.

********

Jesus, Callie, Callie thought. “Fun to play with?” What the fuck’s wrong with you?

She had been thinking back on her last conversation with Duncan for more or less the entire five-minute jog to campus. She couldn’t understand what made her say the comment in the first place. Or what she even met by it.

Worse, Callie was worried that she may have undone all the progress she had made with Duncan. He’d been a bit skittish the previous night, not that she could blame him after everything he had been through. She could only imagine what he thought of her now, after basically calling him a toy.

He had to be pissed, right? Or maybe scared of her? Does he now think of her the same way he thinks of her?

That was the weirdest part: He just smiled and pretended like she didn’t almost say maybe the most offensive thing you could say to someone his size. Did he just not realize what she what she was about to say?

Or maybe he’s into it, Callie wondered with a cheeky smile before shaking the thought away. Where the fuck did THAT come from?

However, before she could delve deeper into that rabbit hole, she froze. Right in front of her were the double doors to room 1110, the lecture hall hosting her advanced business and statistical analysis class. In her rush to get there, she had completely forgotten about where it was she was going.

Callie looked herself up and down, her stomach sinking as she realized that she wasn’t wearing her usual combination of sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt. Yesterday’s outfit showed off way too much skin for this class.

Shit, shit, shit! she thought, taking a deep breath. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll just sneak into the back row, and maybe he won’t even notice me.

Another deep breath and Callie gently pushed the left door open just enough for her to slip through. She could hear Professor Stillwell droning on about prescriptive analyses and various details on analytic modeling as she snuck into the closest seat in the back row of the amphitheater-style lecture hall, keeping her head down in an effort to avoid notice.

While situating herself in her seat, she reached for her backpack, only to realize that she had left it at the apartment as well. She choked down a frustrated groan. Now she didn’t have a textbook or notebook to bury her face in. Pushing down the building dread in her gut, she decided to chance a look at her professor, who seemingly hadn’t taken a breath as he continued to lecture the class.

Callie looked up from the slide-out desk built into the left armrest of her seat, only to be met by Professor Stillwell focusing right on her as he spoke to the class.

She quickly lowered her eyes back to her desk, pretending to write in something. After a few minutes, she looked up again to see the professor glancing around the lecture hall as he continued to teach. She tried to pay attention to the lecture, but just as she had settled her accelerated heart rate, her eyes met his again, causing her to look away.

For the better part of an hour, he played this game with her, just like he did every session. She couldn’t comprehend how, in a class of 145 students, no one else ever seemed to notice the creepy looks he kept giving her. Maybe they just didn’t care. Or maybe they blamed her.

At the end of class, Professor Stillwell gave the students the next reading assignment and dismissed them. Callie got up right away, prepared to make a beeline for the door.

“Ms. Voss,” the professor called out. “A moment, please.”

Callie stopped before she had taken her first step toward the door. She closed her eyes tight and squeezed her fists at her sides in an effort to calm her nerves. Once she opened her eyes and relaxed her hands, she turned to face Professor Stillwell, who was just finishing a jog up the stairs toward her.

“I’m certainly delighted to see you feeling more comfortable this afternoon, Ms. Voss,” he said.

Callie gave the professor a questioning look.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

Professor Stillwell held eye contact with Callie, flashing her an unsettling grin as he spoke.

“Yes, I’ve been most concerned about your attire in this class,” he said.

As Callie struggled to look away from the intense stare of her professor, she noticed his dark green eyes flick downward, taking in her exposed body in a fraction of a second before coming back up to meet hers once again. It happened so fast that she almost wasn’t sure that it had actually happened, but watching his creepy grin grow just a tiny bit wider was all the confirmation she needed.

She scrunched her body inward, slouching and crossing her arms at chest level in a vain attempt to hide as much of her revealed flesh as possible.

“Even in this warmer weather, you always seem to be so cold, dressing in such heavy clothing,” Professor Stillwell said. “For the past month, I’ve taken the liberty of elevating the classroom’s temperature by five degrees a half hour before class, for your benefit of course. I’m relieved to see that doing so has finally paid off.”

Callie shivered at the words “paid off.” The lecture hall had seemed warmer to her lately, but she attributed that to wearing sweats to class despite the warm early spring weather. To hear the real reason for this only added to the uneasy feeling creeping up her spine.

“Yeah, it … I-I’ve just been feeling this … chill in class,” she said.

Finally able to break the hold Professor Stillwell’s stare had on her, Callie’s own gaze immediately retreated down to the ground.

“Well, again, I’m just happy that you seem to have gotten over that now,” he said, pausing briefly before continuing. “Ms. Voss, have you given any more thought to what we discussed after your first exam?”

Callie dropped her right arm to her side, rubbing it just above the elbow with her left hand. She still couldn’t bring herself to look up at the professor.

“You mean about your office hours?” she asked.

Of course, Callie already knew the answer to that question.

“Yes,” Professor Stillwell said. “Your performance on that exam was obviously less than ideal. A 45% simply isn’t going to get you through this class. Speaking frankly, I’m downright flummoxed that you haven’t been by to see me as of yet.”

Without warning, the professor took another step forward, putting just inches between him and Callie. The sudden movement pulled her attention away from the floor with a slight gasp. His sinister smile melted into a menacing frown and his voice lowered to just above a whisper as he addressed her once more.

“I don’t exactly make this offer to just any student,” Professor Stillwell said. “You’re really quite fortunate that I’m willing to go to such lengths to assist you. It just pains me to see one such as you waste their … potential.”

Callie turned her head to her right side, again finding it difficult to look at the professor.

“I understand,” she said.

A knowing smirk replaced Professor Stillwell’s threatening countenance.

“Good then,” he said. “Remember that I’m willing to work around your schedule, Ms. Voss. I believe I’ve already given you my personal number?”

The professor didn’t bother waiting for a response, his right arm barely brushing against Callie’s as he walked by her and through the lecture hall entryway. She found that she couldn’t will herself to move right away, a slight tremble leaving her knees feeling weak.

After taking several slow, deep breaths to regain her composure, she managed to leave the lecture hall as well. For the entirety of the walk back to the apartment, she kept replaying the conversation with Professor Stillwell in her head, becoming more disgusted with herself each time.

That dirty feeling was still permeating throughout Callie’s body as she unlocked her apartment door. She took a few distracted steps into the living room as she closed the door behind her, not bother to remove her sandals. She glanced over at the tiny clothing, sewing equipment, and still mostly intact slice of lunch meat on the kitchen table, her thoughts drifting back to her little roommate, breaking through her gloom with an involuntary smile.

That smile faded as soon as it came, however, as she realized that Duncan himself wasn’t on the table. A wave of horror washed over her as she realized that had no idea where he was in the apartment that she was so carelessly stomping through.

Callie tried to stop mid-step, but her left foot had already started to come down.

********

Duncan had just finished climbing down from the coffee table and making his way back to the kitchen when the apartment door opened.

The first thing he noticed about Callie as she stepped through the door was her sullen expression. It had always saddened him when she came back in such a state from her three-day-a-week afternoon class, but now that he was fully aware of why she was feeling this way, he felt more angry than sad at seeing her like this.

The second thing Duncan noticed was the shaking of the floor as she completed her first step into the living room. The floor, hollowed by the large boiler room beneath the first floor apartments, was ill equipped to deal with the prodigious girl’s stride.

But before the reality of his situation could really sink in, he became captivated by his new perspective of Callie’s body. It had been a while since he had seen a giant from the ground, and this was the first chance he had to admire this particular giant like this.

She was tall, and not just comparatively so. While seeing her through nearly indiscernible holes in the wall or even from the vantage point offered by the kitchen table, he couldn’t tell, but at ground level, she was noticeably taller than both Kristie and Natasha, as well as several of the giants he hid from during his travels these past six months.

Her legs, shapely columns of pale femininity and each as wide as an elevator shaft, dominated his attention. They stretched skyward until they disappeared under the canopy of denim that pressed against her upper thighs with each quaking step. Then there were her feet, wrapped in stylish brown sandals that barely contained them.

And what shade of pink nail polish was that on her toes? Fuchsia? Rose? Duncan never claimed to be an expert on fashion or what color looked good with what, but he couldn’t help but admire Callie’s elegant, slender toes and the way that polish made them pop, especially against the leather sandal strap that wrapped around them at the knuckle and the sea of purple shag surrounding the whole package.

It wasn’t until her third step that he broke from his trance and registered that he directly in her walking path. As her right foot touched down, by his standard, about 20 feet in front of him, the impact shook the floor enough to cause him to stumble forward. Before he had fully recovered, her left foot was already airborne.

Duncan looked straight up as he regained his balance, only to see Callie’s sandal hover directly above him as it descended from the heavens.

Eh, not how I thought I would go, but I guess if I had to pick … he thought.

But as Callie’s sandal came down, it also attempted to retreat. By the time it came down, it’s landing zone had been altered just enough for the foot to slam right in front of Duncan rather than on top of him.

The force behind the step was fierce. The old floor beneath the carpet rattled deafeningly in his ears as it continued to shake for several seconds, knocking him on top of her second and third toes, his face buried in the webbing between them.

“Ohmigod! Duncan!” Callie cried out.

Duncan raised his head from between the giantess’s toes, his face drenched in her foot sweat. The salty taste in his mouth, although not pleasant, wasn’t as gross as he would have thought. His eyes shot wide open as a sour scent stung his nostrils as he inhaled through his nose, taking traces of her sweat within as well. Perhaps more surprisingly, he felt his stiffening cock brush against the tip of her third toe.

What the shit?! he panicked internally. Why am I getting hard over this?

Shaking and wiping as much of the sweat as he could from his face, he quickly pushed off the strap around her toes and got back to his feet, not wanting Callie to feel his hardness.

By the time Duncan had recovered, Callie was already on her right knee and reaching for him. He was scooped up from behind by her right hand, reminiscent of a chairlift at a ski lodge, and brought before her watery eyes, which examined him thoroughly for potential injury. Mercifully, his seated position helped him hide the bulge in his pants, which was starting to subside.

“I’m so, so, so sorry!” she said. “I’m so fuckin’ stupid! I … I coulda killed you. I just keep fuckin’ up!”

Tears began to roll down Callie’s cheeks. Sitting in her palm, Duncan wanted to comfort her and tell her that it wasn’t her fault. At the same time, even though he was feeling pretty guilty about it, he didn’t want to admit to ogling her instead of trying to get out of her way. So he decided on an internal compromise.

“You’re not stupid, and you’re not fucking up,” he said. “It’s my fault. I should have stuck to the walls if I was going to be moving around on the floor.”

Callie shook her head as she stood up, careful not to jostle her little passenger, and slowly made her way to the living room couch.

“When I say we’re roomies, that means that this apartment is as much yours as it is mine,” she said. “You should have free reign of the place, just like I do. I just need be more careful and watch my step. This won’t be happening again. Thanks for tryin’ to make me feel better, though.”

Callie took a seat on the couch, gently depositing Duncan on the coffee table with a tilt of her hand, his butt scraping against her palm as he slid off it. She smiled appreciatively at her tiny friend, but the crying didn’t stop. As the smile faded and the sobbing began, he realized that she couldn’t stop.

“Something else has you upset, too,” he said. “I could see it when you first walked through the door.”

The crying stopped, and Callie just stared blankly at Duncan.

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said.

Duncan acknowledged Callie’s reluctance with a slow nod.

“That’s no problem,” he said. “I was planning handling that part anyway.”

Duncan started pacing on the coffee table, arms behind his back, never straying past the width of the colossal co-ed. Her eyes, carrying a sense of uncertainty, followed him as he marched back and forth in front of her.

“So I couldn’t help but notice that you’re taking advanced business and statistical analysis this semester,” he began. “I know that can be a rough class, especially for—“

Callie’s face suddenly contorted in anger.

“I said I don’t wanna talk about it!” she snapped, immediately cringing afterward. “Sorry. It’s just that, I know you’re tryin’ to help, but this isn’t just about some class. You don’t understand. No one does. And even if you did …”

Callie lowered her head in shame. Duncan, for his part, stopped pacing but stood his ground during her outburst. It was terrifying, being yelled at by a someone her size, but he had actually expected that type of reaction from her and was prepared for it. He knew how sensitive a topic this was, but he felt like he had to push.

So he decided to stop dancing around the issue.

“Professor Stillwell is pressuring you to have sex with him, isn’t he?” he asked.

Callie removed her face from her drenched palms, stunned, as she stared down at Duncan. He gave her a second to process what he had just said before continuing.

“He told you the only way you would ever pass his class is to get on the curve,” he said. “And the only way to do that is …”

Duncan trailed off. He could tell by the shock written all over Callie’s face that she already knew how that sentence ended.

“How?” she questioned. “How could you possibly know that?”

Duncan unfolded his arms from behind his back and stepped closer to Callie’s knees, which poked well above the edge of the table, clamped closed for what he assumed were obvious reasons.

“I TA’ed for that fucking monster for half a semester a few years back,” he answered.

Callie’s eyes widened at the revelation.

“You went to SWSU, too?!” she exclaimed.

Duncan nodded.

“Southwest State has an incredible MBA program,” he said. “I did my undergrad at Capital Tech back East.”

Callie’s excitement at attending the same school as Duncan seemed to taper, her widened eyes narrowing in on her runty roommate.

“Hold up,” she said slowly. “TAs work full semesters. Professor Stillwell run you off?”

Duncan shook his head.

“That’s not quite how it went down,” he said. “Carlton Stillwell definitely hates my guts, though, which makes me smile.”

Leaning down toward him, Callie’s inquisitive face hovered above Duncan as she scrutinized him closely.

“Okay, You need to spill on what happened with you two,” she said.

Duncan took a couple steps backward to better see Callie’s cutely imposing face.

“So, like I said, I was his TA for advanced business and stats during the fall semester three years ago,” he explained. “Stillwell was pretty annoyed that he got stuck with a TA, and he pretty much ignored me for the first month or so. Then he realized I actually knew this stuff well enough to teach it and …”

********

“There’s a fuckin’ list?!” Callie yelled, causing Duncan to cringe. “Oh shit, sorry again!”

She smiled apologetically down at her miniature friend, hoping that he would understand her outburst. He had just finished explaining how Professor Stillwell had pawned the class lectures off on him, making him the de facto instructor after the first class exam. But it was when he started telling her about the professor’s instructions for grading the midterm that she lost her cool.

“No, that’s the right reaction,” he said. “But as I was saying, after that pretentious jerkoff pulled me aside, he started going on about this secret curve for the class, and then he gave me a list with five student names on it. All girls. All tall. All blonde.”

Callie slowly leaned back on the couch, staring straight ahead while losing herself in thought.

So it wasn’t anything I did? she asked herself. I’m just his type? That can’t be right.

“Are you okay?” a voice called to Callie from below.

She snapped back to reality, diverting her attention back to her coffee table and the little man staring back at her.

“Y-yeah, sorry,” Callie said. “It’s just a lot to take in, but I’m good. So what did you do when he gave you this list?”

Callie did her best to give a reassuring smile under Duncan’s uncertain gaze. Seeming satisfied, he continued his story.

“I had seen him perving on a couple of those girls in class, so I had a guess about why they were on the curve list,” he said. “But I had to be sure before I did anything about it, so I looked each of them up in the school directory and went to ask them about it in person.”

Callie’s eyelids refused to blink as her curiosity about the professor’s previous victims demanded her complete attention.

“Two of them denied it,” he recalled. “One of them slapped me; I’m pretty sure she thought I was trying to get in on whatever deal she had with Professor Rapist. Another one tried to seduce me, probably for the same reason.”

Callie looked on as Duncan broke eye contact with her, a despondent look upon his face as he stared down at his feet.

“But the last one, she broke down and cried,” he said. “She told me everything. She was struggling the first few weeks of class and went to see that asshole during his office hours. He was nice to her and even offered her some ‘additional tutoring’ after his regular hours, which she happily took him up on. They met at her apartment. The next thing she knew, he was inside her, promising her at least a B on the midterm. She was supposed to see him again if she wanted the same on the final, though.”

Callie felt tears welling up in eyes once again as Duncan went on.

“I went to the business school dean after talking with that girl,” he said. “It turns out he’s golfing buddies with the professor. The two of them tried to get me kicked out of school. Long story short, I ended up taking my cast to the board of trustees, the girls were all given automatics As for the class, I was paid for a full semester of TA work without having to show up, and we were all assured that they would discipline Stillwell ‘internally.’”

A derisive chuckle left Duncan’s lips.

“Of course, we all had to sign NDAs for any of that to happen,” he said. “Can’t have the school getting embarrassed, after all.”

At the conclusion of Duncan’s story, the two of them spent several minutes sitting in silence, neither of them seeming to know what to say. Then, Callie leaned forward and laid her right hand on the table beside Duncan, palm up, as she gave him a pleading look. He accepted the invitation, stepping into her hand and riding it as it gently elevated until he was level with the giant girl’s chest, her eyes looking away from him.

“That’s not quite how it happened with me,” she said softly. “The professor, he came up to me after we got our first exam grades back. I bombed it pretty hard. He asked me to stay after class; I felt like I was back in middle school or something.”

Callie subconsciously shifted her palm and wrapped her fingers around Duncan, leaving only his head and shoulders sticking out of her fist. Her thumb and index finger parted, giving the little man a chance to free his arms, which he swiftly took. As the two digits came back together, she felt him lay his arms on top of them.

She began to squeeze his body gently as she continued.

“After it was just us in the room, he just straight up said that if I fucked him a few times he’d give me a better grade on the midterm and that we could talk about the final later,” Callie said.

Looking down at Duncan for the first time, she finally noticed that he was in her grip. Horrified, she relieved the pressure in her fingers and opened her mouth, ready to apologize for yet another screw up. But then she noticed that he was rubbing her index finger with his right hand, a gentle smile on his face as he looked up at her.

“You’re good,” he said. “Go on.”

Callie smiled down at him, slightly tightening her grip once again but watching Duncan this time to make sure he was comfortable in her fingers. He didn’t physically acknowledge the light squeeze, something for which she was grateful. She wasn’t sure if she could get through this without it.

She also just really liked holding him like this.

“I noticed him looking at me in class pretty early on,” Callie said. “It was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t concentrate on the lectures. Fuck, just looking at the book made me feel slimy after a while. But I never expected him to just say it out loud like that. I didn’t know what to do. So I just left. Didn’t say a word.”

She released a slow, deliberate exhale in an effort to purge the memory from her mind and move forward with her story.

Almost done, she told herself.

“Up until now, he hadn’t mentioned it again. Just acted like everything was fine,” she said. “But the staring got worse. So much worse. And then today, after class, he comes up to me and asks me about those ‘office hours’ we had talked about. That’s what he called it when he first said he wanted to fuck me: extra office hours.”

Callie opened her fingers as she tilted her hand flat once again, leaving Duncan in a sitting position, his elbows digging into the breast of her palm as he leaned back.

“I can’t even look at the book. I can’t focus on the lectures. I’m fucked,” she said. “I hate him so much, but if I don’t do this, I’m going to fail out of school. I know I don’t look like it, but I got plans, Duncan. Dreams. I … I gotta get my degree to get there, though. I-I don’t know what to do.”

Callie’s last words came out as a whisper. Again, the room became quiet. Then, Duncan sat up straight and shot her an odd look, one she couldn’t quite read.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

The humongous housemate, taken aback, gazed down incredulously on the guy sitting in her palm.

“What?” Callie questioned.

Surely Duncan wasn’t asking her what she thought he was asking her, right?

“Do you. Want. To. Fuck. Him?” he asked again.

Callie glared down at the miniature man in her hand.

“Of course not!” she answered. “Like, what the fuck kind of question even is that?!”

Duncan ignored Callie’s query, staring up at the giant girl with a resolute look in his eyes.

“Seems like you’ve got your answer, then,” he said. “Hey, that was actually pretty easy!”

As she set Duncan back on the tabletop, Callie glowered down at him, taken aback by his cavalier attitude toward her situation.

“Not funny,” she said. “It’s not that easy. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Just fail and act like it’s no big deal?”

Duncan casually shrugged his shoulders.

“Were you not listening when I was talking?” he asked. “Or maybe you just missed the part where I pretty much taught this exact class?"

The agitation drained from Callie’s annoyed countenance, a look of surprise taking its place.

“You mean you want to teach me?” she asked. “I-I can’t ask you to do that. You got too many problems to worry about for me to start pilin’ mine on top of ‘em.”

Duncan’s expression became serious.

“Callie, I’ve known you for a day, and you’ve already done more for me than anyone I’ve ever met,” he said. “I know what I can and can’t handle, and I can do this. I want to do this.”

A smirk crossed Duncan’s lips.

“Besides, weren’t you just saying yesterday how all you wanted was for someone to show up and help you out,” he said, holding his right hand out toward her, palm flat. “Well here, have some fucking help!”

Callie barely registered a surprised yelp from Duncan as she scooped him up with her left hand and swiftly brought him to her right cheek. Her hand enveloping all but his head from behind, she ignored the slight tickle of his heels against the middle of her palm as she pressed him into tear-stained skin.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

********

From the left cushion of the small-mountain-sized couch, Duncan leaned against its back as he sat back, relaxed, and caught up on the latest goings on in the business world via a TV show featuring a balding man with a zany, exaggerated attitude and a plethora of wacky sound effects at his disposal. Not the most trusted source, but he had been out of the loop for six months and was therefore curious enough to turn to basic cable for a glimpse of how things had changed in that time.

Callie had set the shrunken man down on the cushion after holding him against her cheek for several minutes, finding the show at his request and leaving the remote control next to him before heading off to shower and get ready for work. He was pretty sure he could work the remote with a bit of effort, but he hadn’t tried as of yet, unsure of how he would deal with the blow to his ego if his assumption was proven wrong.

Rumbling footsteps announced that the titaness was finished with her prework preparations and now entering the living room. Looking up, Duncan saw her slightly touched-up face over the couch shoulder directly behind him.

She really doesn’t even need that little bit of makeup she has on, he thought idly.

Another long stride, and the rest of giantess came into view from behind the couch. She was wearing white sundress decorated in a pink floral pattern, tastefully stopping just above the knee. A thin pink sash was tied around her waist.

She walked in front of him to reach the opposite cushion of the two-seated furniture piece. Her steps generated a moderate breeze, inadvertently chilling him a bit and blowing his scruffily excess hair about.

Callie sat down on the cushion opposite Duncan, descending slow enough to not jostle the tiny guy. She told him that she still had some time before she had to leave. Then the two sat and watched TV for a few minutes.

“Hey Duncan,” she broke the silence without looking away from the screen, “what did you do before you shrank? Like, for a job, I mean.”

Duncan realized that his confusion at the randomness of the question must have been apparent, as, after finally turning to face him, Callie explained herself before he could respond.

“It’s just, you said before that you got your MBA from here,” she said. “And I just realized that I never even asked anything about your life from before you got tiny.”

Duncan had already forgotten that he mentioned that minor detail during their talk earlier. Despite not thinking too much about his previous life nowadays, Callie’s interest made him feel kind of happy for some reason.

“I worked as a financial manager and adviser for Shale Holdings,” he said. “I mostly split my time between evaluating our various holdings and offering advise to some of their clients.”

Callie’s eyes lit up.

“Shale Holdings?!” she exclaimed. “Do … Do you know Monica Shale?”

Duncan’s voice carried a bit of uncertainty in it as he answered.

“Yeah, I reported to her directly,” he said. “How do you know who she is?”

Callie’s indignance at the question seemed to do little to detract from her excitement.

“Are you serious?!” she said. “How could I not know who number two on Business Happenings Monthly’s top 35 CEOs under 35 list is? She took over the company three years ago, Duncan. Three years! She’s only 28! She’s, like, my hero!”

Callie paused briefly, and Duncan could see the gears turning in her head.

“Hold up, she’s your boss? Like, your boss boss?” she asked. “What’s she like?”

Duncan gave a dry chuckle.

“Let’s see,” he said. “She’s cold-blooded, incredibly nosy, and super aggressive, even when it comes to personal ‘advice.’”

Callie smiled dreamily as she counted off her own interpretation of Duncan’s analysis on the fingers of her right hand.

“So what I’m hearin’ is that she’s laser focused, cares deeply about her employees, and is determined to help them, even when they don’t know they need it,” she said. “She sounds even more amazing than I thought. But does she really get so involved in your guys’ lives like that? I’d think she’d be pretty busy for that.”

Duncan held out his right hand with a bent elbow and rocked it in a so-so gesture.

“She never really talked much with most of us outside of work duties,” he said. “But for some reason, she always liked to dig into my personal life, tell me how I should handle things.”

A small grunt of frustration escaped Callie’s throat.

“It’s because she cares about you, stupid,” she said before her eyes went big. “Oh, you should let her know what happened to you! It sounds to me like she’d be worried about you.”

Duncan also went wide-eyed but for a completely different reason.

“That’s a really bad idea,” he said. “You don’t know her like I do.”

Callie rolled her eyes.

“Um, I read, like, four different feature stories and interviews on Monica Shale, so pretty sure I know her,” she said. “Besides, a job like that doesn’t come around too often, does it? Maybe if you tell her what happened to you, you can get your job back when you get back to normal or something.”

Duncan wanted to tell Callie that there was no way his position was left vacant for six months. He wanted to tell her that he had no interest in letting anyone else, and most certainly not Monica, know about his current size. But looking up at that hopeful bundle of optimism staring back at him, he couldn’t bring himself to get in the way that.

“555-9264,” he mumbled. “That will get you through to Allysia, her personal secretary. That’s as close as non-family gets to a personal number for Monica. Allysia will probably just take a message, and maybe, if you’re right, Monica might give you a call back in a few days.”

Nodding along with Duncan’s explanation, Callie grabbed her phone from the coffee table without taking her eyes off him. She dialed the number and sat the phone down between the two of them.

“You’ve reached the office of Monica Shale,” a bored young woman’s voice emitted from the phone speaker. “May I ask what your business is with Ms. Shale?”

Callie cleared her throat and appeared to be doing her best to sound professional, something Duncan struggled to not laugh at.

“Yes, I’m calling regarding Duncan …”

A panicked look on her face, Callie mouthed a question Duncan, almost silently asking for his last name.

“Duncan?” Allysia asked on the other end of the phone. “You mean Duncan Brenadine?!”

Duncan gave Callie a thumbs up, and she quickly confirmed the secretary’s assumption.

“Uh, h-hold please,” Allysia said before the line was, in fact, put on hold.

“Well that was unexpected,” Duncan said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard her that energetic before.”

As soon as he finished his sentence, the line opened once again.

“Duncan?!” a different voice, also distinctly feminine, was heard through the phone.

Hearing Monica call out his name caused Duncan’s breathing to stop. He couldn’t move. He looked up and saw Callie looking at him expectantly. Thankfully, she quickly realized that he was in no condition to speak at the moment.

“Uh, no ma’am. M-my name is Callie Voss, and I’m, uh, I’m calling on Duncan’s behalf,” she stuttered. “Is this Ms. Shale?”

Callie’s response was met with a brief silence before Monica spoke her next words.

“I see,” she said, the emotion previously in her voice now completely gone. “So Mr. Brenadine goes missing for six months only to have his new secretary call to inform me that he’s accepted a new position. I would have thought he would have had the … gumption to at least speak to me himself.”

Duncan could see sweat starting to form on Callie’s forehead so far above him.

“H-hold up,” she said. “That … that’s not h-how it is at all.”

Duncan could almost see the sneering smirk on his old boss’ face as she already had Callie on the ropes.

“Well then, Ms. Voss, please do tell me how it is,” she said in an icy tone. “I’ll ‘hold up’ for as long as is necessary.”

Callie’s hands started to shake.

“I … well, I—“ she tried to answer.

Monica cut her off.

“Actually, could you take care of something for me, Ms. Voss,” she said in a voice that was anything but asking. “Please tell Mr. Brenadine that, despite whatever … all this is, that he is free to meet me in my office on Monday at 7 a.m. sharp.”

Callie tried to respond, but Monica interrupted her once again.

“If he cares at all about his position with this company, he’ll be there,” she said with a bit of harshness. “And he had better have a satisfactory explanation for his whereabouts all this time, or employment prospects will be the least of his concerns.”

A dial tone signaled the end of the call almost as soon as Monica’s last syllable was uttered. Callie and Duncan spent the next few minutes staring at each other, completely stunned.

It was the giantess who spoke first.

“That. Was. Awesome!” she yelled. “I can’t wait to meet her in person!”

Duncan was initially too dumbfounded at Callie’s first sentence to process her second. By the time he caught up, he was even more confused.

“In person?” he asked. “You can’t possibly think I’m going to meet with her. Definitely not like this! Or after that!”

Callie picked up her phone and stood up, a wide grin on her face.

“Oh, we’re goin’,” she said.

A feeling of dread welled in Duncan’s stomach.

“You’re going to make me go?” he asked.

Callie’s smile reversed into a frown.

“Of course not,” she said, her smile returning immediately afterward. “But I got all weekend to convince you. And I think we both know I’m gonna pull it off.”

Duncan cringed. Somewhere deep down, he knew she was right.

“Shit, you keep makin’ me run late today,” she giggled as she looked back at her phone. “I’ll be back after work. Try not to worry about it in the mean time. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, anyway?”

Duncan watched as Callie slipped on her sandals, grabbed her purse, and put her phone inside the bag as she left the apartment.

“Yeah …” he trailed off as he looked back at the TV.

With a little more effort than he would have cared to admit, Duncan successfully pushed down the button to unmute the business show. He was bombarded by the TV speaker projecting the host screaming “Sell!” like a mad man over and over again as he smashed a keyboard on a pedestal with a baseball bat and stomped several times on the broken pieces, each larger than Duncan, the name of a prominent tech company displayed on the bottom of the screen. Duncan shuddered.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” he muttered quietly.