Morning was creeping in through the windows in the Tomlin/Lyotel household.

Jennifer stirred, enjoying the warmth of the bed, and listening to Stuart’s low, rhythmic breathing for a moment. He was spooning her from behind, his breath brushing against her neck. She then surreptitiously slid his arm from over her waist and slipped out of the bed. He remained asleep. She was a master of getting around silently if she wanted to.

She slunk down the hallway and went out into the living room, to the table holding Jerry’s sponge bed. She knew Jerry’s sleep routine from living with him during their relationship, and took delight in waking a little earlier than him, to get a moment to admire his prone form and provide her own creative brand of alarm clock.

Whatever time he woke, she ensured that she woke at least five minutes earlier. If he had planned to wake at 5.00am, then she would have been up at 4:55am. There was something that excited her about seeing her own huge shadow fall across his comparatively small body, but this time she was denied the joy, as the sponge bed was empty, and the hand towel blanket tossed off, like Jerry had jumped out of bed with particular eagerness.  

That was unexpected. He loved sleeping in more than he hated being tickled awake by her.

“Jerry?” she said, furrowing her brow. He was hiding from her again, the little rat!

She padded around the room even though she knew she had little hope of finding him just looking. There were too many potential hiding spots in the house for someone his size.

There was a better idea; she would pretend not to care, and get Stuart to play along, too, making Jerry eventually come out on his own to see what they were doing. As soon as his guard slipped, she would pounce and make him wish he’d just stayed in bed.

But after midday came and went, neither of them had seen a trace of Jerry. Unless he was sneaking food from the cupboard somehow, he hadn’t had breakfast or lunch. And Jerry never missed meals.

They began to search the house, calling his name. She was getting worried and angry, thinking that if Jerry was playing them, then he was going to be sorry when they found him.

But in the back of her mind she had to suppress the dire images flashing up; Jerry had gone sleepwalking and a heavy object had fallen onto him, or he’d tumbled off a ledge, or gotten terrorized by intruding vermin.

They continued to scour the house as the day went on.

She even got down against the floor, trying to imagine how the house looked from Jerry’s point of view, the places he would think to hide in.

In the lobby by the front door, she caught herself in the mirror on the wall, and ran her hand anxiously through her sleek hair, examining herself somewhat girlishly. Yes, she was a very good looking woman. But did the assessment still hold from about 4 inches off the ground?

Could it be that the glances Jerry gave her – the hilarious way his eyes spaced out like his brain had just crashed – were not inspired by lust – as she interpreted it – but terror? Had she so disastrously misread him? The thought sent a shiver of panic through her. All her actions had been intended to keep their relationship on as good terms as possible – as well as having a little harmless 'playtime' on the side. But if she had misread him all this time then she might have possibly disgusted him and driven him away.

But there was another explanation for his absence that frightened her even more. She was beginning to feel like Jerry wasn’t in the house at all. That someone had broken in and taken him. Maybe it was women’s intuition, though that sort of stuff made her eyes roll. But she could not deny she had an almost psychic feeling about knowing where Jerry was without looking.

And it was totally absent right now.

It must have been that stupid media bit they did; it was a big loud advertisement to everyone. Some people probably found out Jerry was worth a lot of money and had kidnapped him for ransom.

She was beginning to feel sick.

Why? She despaired silently.

They could’ve taken the TV, the sofas, the car, cleaned out the safe. His funds aside, Jerry had no personal value to anyone. Except her. Taking him was such a personal, unthinkable insult against her; she felt like he was privately hers in some indescribable way, like a childhood teddy bear, and taking him felt like an intimate crime against her. Without Jerry, she only felt like one half of herself. She didn’t believe in the nonsense that she had a soul mate or a destined lover, but if anyone on the planet fit the description…

Some women might have been seized by helpless anxiety at this point. Some women might have collapsed into a fit of crying.

Stuart had seen Jennifer get annoyed before, but she was good at hiding it, smoothing it over with a disparaging joke.

This was the first time he ever saw Jennifer get properly mad.

*

“SO TELL ME ABOUT THIS GIRL YOU’RE SO AFRAID OF,” said Natalie, resting her head against her palm.

We had just awoken. She had put on a t-shirt and pajama pants and was lying on her stomach on her bed, and I was sitting cross-legged just beneath her face. This was a regretful position now, her face was so close to me that she bathed me in her morning breath, with long repeated warm gusts. But I didn’t say anything; I had only just met her in person and didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Particularly as I had nowhere else to go.

Plus I was quick to forgive her, anyway, normal sized people tended not to realize how sensitive I was to little things like touch and scent, so they tended to underestimate how close they were positioned to me. A giant person's natural urge was to lean right in, in order to make out the tiny features of my face, and hear my voice. By contrast, from my point of view, this made their facial features blow out into an inescapable panorama, and their voices quake my teeny eardrums like the horn of a freightliner.

I fidgeted with my hands in my lap.

“I believe she wanted to kill me,” I said slowly, measuring my words, “Or, not ‘wanted’ exactly, but if it had happened incidentally…I don’t know. She’s a psycho. She drugged me in order to fuck me and it made me go through a time warp wrong.”

I was almost incoherent but didn’t care. It felt good getting a lot of stuff out of my system. Being out of Jennifer and Stuart’s house was liberating. I could say anything about them.

Natalie shifted around, her white teeth flashing as she laughed, having difficulty making sense of what I was saying.

Butterflies jittered in my stomach. She had a gorgeous smile, easy, totally uninhibited. It made me want to grab her head and kiss her. Obviously with my little hands, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

Jennifer was hot, but her thing was smirking and raising an eyebrow, biting her lip, little coquettish things. Her face was composed like a sphinx, damming up any rush of spontaneous emotions from getting through. Getting a broad, open smile from her was like trying to make one of the Queen’s guards laugh.

“SO WHY’D THEY PUT YOU UP IF THEY DON’T CARE FOR YOU PROPERLY? WHAT, ARE THEY TRYING TO TURN YOU INTO A LITTLE SLAVE OR SOMETHING?”

“No. Her boyfriend, Stuart, I don’t know how or why he agreed to it. But she’s an attention whore. I think she likes to lord over me – or ‘lady’ over me, in a manner of speaking.”

“THIS IS YOUR EX, RIGHT?” Natalie tilted her head like a confused dog, her brow furrowed in confusion. “HOW’D YOU EVEN FIND HER IN THE FIRST PLACE?”

I sighed.

“We both had problems. It’s like our problems complimented each other. She loves being the pursuer. She loves the chase. Don’t know why but it’s always been that way.”

“WEIRD,” Natalie muttered. She seemed more interested in fondling me rather than paying too much attention to what I was saying. She was now playing a little game of nipping at my toes between her fingers. One of her long nails snaked out and brushed up the sole of my foot, attempting to tickle me.

“Hey!” I said, jerking my foot away, slapping her finger playfully.

“I CAN’T HELP MYSELF!” she whined. “YOU’RE SO TINY AND ADORABLE!”

No matter how many times I shifted my feet, her mischievous probing fingers kept creeping back to distract me.

Scooting a little way across the bed from her, I carried on:

“Problem is she doesn’t get to chase many guys, because most guys are too busy falling flat on their faces at her feet.”

Natalie folded her arms under her chin and looked at me seriously.

“IF YOU ASK ME, SHE SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S A LOT OF TROUBLE. MAYBE SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT SHE WANTS.”

“You’re right about that. You don’t try to understand what she wants; you’ll never figure it out. It’s an unsolvable riddle. She likes to order guys around, but hates guys who do everything she says. She needs to feel like the centre of attention but likes guys who act distant, like they’re too cool for her. And she loves feeling desired but likes guys who put up a fight.”

A tiny smile twitched at the corner of Natalie's mouth.

“SOUNDS LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT SHE WANTS.”

“From trial and error, maybe. With her, there is a penalty if you guess wrong.”

Natalie shook her head in bemusement.

“YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE IT WAS SOME ABUSE SITUATION.”

“Oh, it was an abuse situation,” I nodded.

“WELL, YOU DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE, YOU LIVE WITH ME NOW,” she said playfully. “SO SNAP OUT OF THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME!”

She suddenly pinched my ankles between her index finger and thumb and lifted me into the air. I was dangled upside before her eyes, and stared back at her, taken aback. This wasn’t a side I’d seen of her before – not that I knew her very well. But it reminded me of something Jennifer might do, and that brought a lump to my throat.

Without any warning, she brought me right up against her face and, hooking a finger down my top to drag it down below my armpits, planted a chaste kiss against my bare stomach, before lowering me back down to the bed. Then she giggled in spite of herself, flushing a little. She seemed to think we’d just done something naughty and I hated to disabuse her of the notion.

Because she was the normal one, not me.

It wasn’t normal to pick up a guy by the ankles, dangle him like a fish and kiss his belly like he was an infant. I couldn’t believe I had to tell myself this. But I had been conditioned otherwise.

Where Jennifer was sex on legs, Natalie was like the ‘oops-I-accidentally-flirted-with-you’ girl next door type who smiled shamelessly, and who seemed to think touching on the arm meant nothing, tickling was just tickling and even kissing my stomach was just messing around. I wanted to cuddle up with her, just cuddle and be wholesome. It seemed profane to want to position myself anywhere in the vicinity of her vagina, or offer to kiss her nipples, or even see her naked.

“It’s not like I worshipped her or something!” I shot back, unsettled by the conflict inside me. “Just because people are so huge to me, doesn’t mean I live in awe of them.”

I added hotly: “And definitely not her. Not after I took the both of them out for dinner, and even after that, she used me like a toy!” My fisted hands trembled with pent up emotion. “She should have just trampled the roses I got her, too!”

Natalie’s smile dropped on one side.

“WAIT, YOU GAVE HER ROSES? UM…WHY?” Her expression was a mixture of hesitation and pity.

“It was her birthday.”

She folded her arms in front of her chest and hunched over them, looking away from me for a moment.

“JERRY, MAYBE BECAUSE YOU’RE A GUY FLOWERS ARE JUST FLOWERS. BUT FROM A MAN TO A WOMAN, ROSES ARE VERY SPECIFIC. IT’S NOT A ‘THANK YOU’ GIFT IT’S AN ‘I WANT YOU’ GIFT. IN YOUR CASE, ‘I WANT YOU BACK’.”

I shook my head, refusing to believe that I might have been sending clueless crossed messages like some socially clumsy ass.

“Jen loves roses. It’s as simple as that. She understood that I didn’t mean anything.”

Natalie went on cautiously, with her eyebrows low over her eyes, scrutinizing me.

“BUT DID HER BOYFRIEND UNDERSTAND?”

I shrugged.

“Didn’t bother him one bit. Stuart is totally understanding about the whole arrangement.”

Pressing her palm against her mouth, Natalie laughed in that pitying way again.

“OH BROTHER. JERRY…I PROMISE YOU, AT MOST HE’S CIVILLY TOLERANT ABOUT IT. IF HE’S UPSET, YOU’RE NOT SEEING IT, BUT IT’S THERE.”

“How do you know that? You've never met him.”

“BECAUSE HE CAN’T LOVE JENNIFER AND LIKE YOU AT THE SAME TIME. YOU’RE HER EX. IT’S NOT HOW THIS WORKS, HONEY.”

As if in consolation, her finger extended and petted my hair.

“You don’t know Stuart. He’s the most laid back guy you’d ever meet. One time Jennifer covered me in lipstick kiss marks as a joke and he just giggled.”

Natalie looked away, frowning for a long time, like she was doing equations in her head.

Finally she looked down at me again, still with that puzzled expression.

“UMMM...THIS GUY, STUART…DOES HE EVER TALK ABOUT, LIKE, LONG TERM PLANS WITH JENNIFER?”

“Honestly? No. But why would they talk about that with me?”

“I MEAN,” she went on, starting to sound a little impatient with me, “HAS EITHER OF THEM EVER SAID TO YOU SOMETHING LIKE: ‘HEY, JERRY, WE’RE THINKING OF TYING THE KNOT ONE DAY, SO WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT A LESS AWKWARD ARRANGEMENT FOR YOU?”

“No."

She didn’t say anything, but just looked at me, almost as if she didn’t believe me, so I began to babble on:

“I guess we’re all short-term minded at the moment. You know, the accident happened too fast to adjust for and –”

“NO,” she interrupted me gently but firmly, “SOMETHING’S NOT ADDING UP HERE.” Then she brightened. “BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER, BECAUSE YOU’RE OUT OF THAT PLACE NOW.”

“Yeah, but they…”

My voice slowly dwindled away.

“Why are you looking at me like tha—erp!”

Her hand slid all around me and yanked me right in against her chest. Meanwhile, her other hand was emerging over my head, curled into a fist. Before I knew it, the knuckle joint of her curled up pointer finger was running back and forth vigorously against my scalp; her version of a good-natured noogie. From her point of view, maybe it was gentle, but the grinding of her finger joint was enough to jerk my head back and forth.

She uttered a sly chuckle as my limbs pushed out against her in helpless self-defence. Sealed inside her hand with only my head sticking out, I had no means of escape or even covering my head. My wriggling only tired me out. She would grind her knuckle back and forth against the crown of my head furiously, then pause a moment, pretending to stop, before the attack resumed without warning.

Her chuckling became open laughter, drowning out my frustrated cries, and as the attack wore on, it began to send sparks of pain flickering over my skull. But I was laughing because she was laughing, and her laughter – like her smile – was infectious.

Only when I stopped wriggling to catch my breath, did her hand quickly place me back onto the bedspread. Her hands, now clasped together, fidgeted as if she was anxious she might have injured me.

“I’M SORRY!” she said, with cheeks flushed from laughing. “ARE YOU OKAY?”

My head felt a little raw, but I nodded.