Not long after, we were all on the dinner table, eating tiny, sliced up bites of pizza. Jennifer sat at the head of the table, eating slowly, drinking wine – lots of wine – and looking between each of us – particularly at Stuart.

She looked tired; ready to crash and was just wearing a satin slip, her still wet part-light-part-dark ombré hair dribbling down her back. She didn’t seem to realize that at our size, it was startlingly obvious from our point of view that she wasn’t wearing a bra. This was because – as I’d so often found previously – when viewed from below, if you wanted to look her in the eyes, your eyes were forced to make the passage up over her chest. And her bodacious mammaries, complete with perking nipples, proved an eye-goggling obstacle to straightforward eye contact.

And with everyone a little raw and anxious over what had happened, no one had the guts to tell her. I only prayed she was wearing underwear, but knowing her, no guarantees there, either.

Oddly, Stuart was not meeting her gaze at all. In fact, he had been acting weird ever since she’d gotten home; quiet and evasive, like he was ignoring her. There was nothing subtle about that; at this size you could no more ignore her than pretend not to notice a rampaging elephant.

Remy was ignoring everyone, too, but not in the same way. He was in full gorge mode. It was pretty clear he loved food…or was a stress eater. And if the latter, the circumstances threatened to overshoot him into obesity.

“ANY MORE AND YOU’RE GOING TO BURST,” Jennifer warned him, prodding his distending stomach gently with the tip of a finger. He flinched but recovered instantly and then went on stuffing crumbs of pizza crust into his mouth.

“Don’t push him,” I said gently to her. “I think he’s in the early stages of a mental breakdown.”

“My whole life,” he spluttered through a mouthful, not to anyone in particular, “I eat healthy, lean, good food.” He shrugged. “Now this happens and here I am packing it in like a starving cow.”

“I REMEMBER WHAT YOU WERE LIKE, AT FIRST,” Jennifer said to me. “YOU TOTALLY FLIPPED YOUR SHIT, TOO.”

“It’s really destabilizing,” I said defensively. “I’m used to it now, but…” I looked over at Stuart, who was staring into space, his mouth thin and tight, “…Stuart will tell you. He said it’s like feeling vulnerable and insignificant – right?”

Across the table, Stuart came to and then, with a small shake of his head, quickly looked away again.

“No, no, Jerry, it’s fine. Let’s not go into it.”

That was not the response I had expected.

Were either of the guys on my wavelength, here? We were all in the same boat now, with a shared understanding of the situation. I had been angry after my accidental miniaturization, sure, but apart from passing out, I didn’t remember being so mentally disoriented.

Maybe if I gave them time, they’d come around and we could have a rational discussion, eventually. I had to be patient and let them adjust.

After dinner, Jennifer made up a bed like my own for Remy. To give us both some space, she put his on the coffee table in the living room, whereas mine was on a table across the room, connected with the kitchen area.

“GOODNIGHT, YOU BOYS,” she said to me and Remy, “—AND YOU,” her eyes came to rest on Stuart, “BEDTIME.”

“Where’s my bed?” he said with innocent curiosity.

“YOUR BED IS STILL YOUR BED,” she said meaningfully.

The color drained out of Stuart’s face until he was sickly pale. He turned clumsily away from Jennifer, his knees actually giving way, causing him to fall over, and reducing him to crawl pathetically on his hands and knees toward me.

“Jerry…” he whispered, grabbing my wrist, “…please, help me…You know her better than I do; what do I have to say – what do I have to do to get her to leave me alone?”

Dumbfounded, I said:

“Stuart, I can’t be your rep on this. You might be smaller now, but you have as big a voice as ever.”

Over his shoulder, I saw Jennifer’s eyes flick from Stuart to me and back, and then narrow.

“STUART,” she intoned slowly, disciplinary, “DON’T YOU TURN AWAY FROM ME. YOU CAN HEAR ME PERFECTLY WELL. I SAID: WE’RE GOING TO BED NOW.”

He rotated back around to face her with all the eagerness of an acrophobe looking out a plane window.

“Honey, please, j-j-just give me a second,” he said with a weak smile, “I just need to…uh…I still need to…um…”

“WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE TO GET YOU INTO BED?” she conjectured, slowly sauntering over to him. With each step, her braless breasts bounced beneath the silk slip. “DO I NEED TO ROLL YOU UP INTO A TINY BALL AND KEEP YOU STUFFED INSIDE MY PANTYHOSE FOR THE ENTIRE NIGHT?”

“No!” Stuart shrieked.

His face was stricken by a look of sheer pants-wetting terror, as if he actually believed her threat was imminent.

Before he could say anything else, Jennifer swiped one hand down and snatched him up off the table. A little whimper escaped him as she carried him towards the master bedroom. She switched off the lights after her.

Once they were out of sight, I let out a big exhalation.

“Oh boy…”

“What?” I heard Remy from his bed on the coffee table. He must have been so in his own world he hadn't heard or made sense of the exchange.

“Never mind,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

At one point early on in the night, I was awoken to hear the ghost of a pre-orgasmic moan – Jennifer? – but when I opened my eyes, the house was still, quiet again, and very dark. And not a peep from Stuart.

The quiet was nice. I rolled over and shut my eyes again, and to my pleasant surprise, had a great night’s sleep. One of the better I’d had since shrinking. No unexpected groaning, or bed-banging.

I dreamt I was big again, and with my money bought a tiny mansion, small enough for my size, but kept adding extensions, extra floor space, raising the ceilings, and made it bigger and bigger until the mansion’s interior resembled something more like a regular house, until I found myself looking at a replica of the inside of Jennifer and Stuart’s house. And then I found I had opened my eyes and actually was in their house.

It was morning, and sunlight was streaming in through the window.

Wait…

What?

Something was different about this morning.

Then I realized: I was alone.

Almost every morning since the first morning I’d awoken in their house, she had been somewhere hovering nearby. She was usually what woke me up. Teasing me awake was one of her ‘games.’

It had taken me a long time to realize she didn’t intend it to be cruel. She had told me that whenever she saw me she had the urge to pluck me up and stroke me, to roll me around on my back in her palm and rub and tickle my stomach, laughing affectionately at my kicking legs. My cute size triggered the urge, and when I was asleep I – allegedly – looked even cuter, so that seeing me in my tiny bed made her fingers itch with the intolerable desire to squeeze me like ripe fruit.

But I ran from her almost all the time. When I was unconscious it was the only time she got alone time with me where she did not have to meet my protests.

To outsiders, none of this probably made any sense – certainly not to Natalie, whose head spun with the unfortunate implications of abuse – but it was one of those strange games we played; a dance we had performed countlessly over the years, though the music kept changing – not to mention my size – the steps were always the same.

Now, I was lying here with a raging boner pointing at the ceiling that my hand alone just wasn’t fully containing. I had assumed if Jennifer stopped waking me up in the morning, the daily boners would go away. Obviously not. A disturbing thought: maybe they would carry on even if I lived on my own, slowly driving me nuts.

Snorting with frustration, I got up, stretched, and, went up the kitchen counter, over to the kitchen sink, where got myself a drink of water, with the help of some shoelace wizardry and manual exertion. I also took the time to splash myself with the cold water in an effort to get my blood circulating to the rest of my body. All the same, hard not to think that I’d rather be awoken by warm hands than chilled water.

It wasn’t long until Jennifer came into the dining area looking noticeably more cheerful and calm than the previous night. She had both hands wrapped around Stuart, who – by contrast – didn’t look so hot.

“Jen –!” he was gasping, his eyelids clenched shut. “Don’t squeeze – don’t squeeze! My chest – I can’t – ! Oh man – hurts! – Oh boy – Don’t – !“

“BABY, I HAVE TO SQUEEZE A LITTLE,” she said calmly but firmly, “OTHERWISE YOU’RE GOING TO SLIP THROUGH MY FINGERS AND CRACK YOUR SKULL ON THE FLOOR. AND WE DON’T WANT THAT, DO WE?”

She slid him down onto the dining table, where he assumed a cramped over sitting position, and sat there panting for a moment. He had a bruise on one side of his face. Later, I would see him shuffling with a limp, and he couldn’t seem to lift his arms very high without grimacing in pain. It looked like he was finding breathing painful. Jennifer went over and clattered around in the kitchen area to make breakfast.

“What happened to you?” I eyed him warily. “Don’t tell me she actually made good on the rolling you up into a ball thing.”

His eyes shifted about for a moment before he answered.

“I fell off the bed.”

I gave him a small humorless smile to show I didn’t buy it.

“It’s not a cakewalk being so small, huh?”

“Jerry,” he briefly looked over his shoulder at Jennifer, and then gave me a long, solemn look. “If I ever trivialized your size in the past, or was too rough and hurt you accidentally, I’m sorry. Good grief…I had no idea it was like this…”

“Don’t be stupid, Stuart. You weren’t rough. You were a little permissive, though.”

He sighed.

“Yeah, permissive. I guess that’s going to be the death of me, now.”

Hey,” I said seriously. “Don’t forget you’re still a person. You have rights. You’ve got to assert your own interests.”

He looked at me, squinting through the pain he was feeling.

“Maybe you’re right.” He was sounding a little more confident emboldened already. “Maybe I’ve just got to man up and tell her what I want, don’t I?”

“Exactly! She’ll even respect you more for it.”

Remy did not have breakfast with us. He was lying in his bed, groaning whenever anyone spoke to him. His gut was still distended from the pizza. It was so bad his shirt no longer fit him and he had taken it off, revealing the hairy ball of his torso. It turned out he’d eaten too much the previous night, all the pizza crust dough had all glued together and left him impacted. To the surprise of no one.

Now he complained of being unable to use the bathroom, and kept trying and failing to vomit. Not pretty. The digestive complications were probably partly due to his altered size, then again, it might have been his diet shift – he did say he used to only eat lean. All the pizza of the previous night had probably shocked his system.

Jennifer stood over the coffee table, running her hands over her brow, staring at Remy like she could not even believe such a thing was possible.

“WHAT IF I DO THIS, SWEETIE, DOES THAT HELP – ?” she said speculatively, and pushed his stomach in an attempt to massage it.

He screamed.

“OKAY,” she said conclusively, turning on her heel, “I’M GETTING DRESSED AND TAKING YOU TO THE VET.”

The word ‘vet’ rang like an ominous bell toll in my mind. I looked at Stuart.

“Be glad you’re not him,” I said, jerking my head.

She had a quick shower and went to pick up Remy off his sponge bed on the coffee table. She deliberated for a moment, but there was no real way to do this without putting pressure on some part of his bulging stomach. She eventually got some success levering her fingers beneath his spine and rolling him sideways onto her hand. He shrieked any time her fingers made contact with his stomach, and once lifted into the air, began to moan weakly, unable to struggle or resist her as went to carry him out of the room.

“MY GOD,” she said with morbid surprise, “YOU’RE SO FIRM – LIKE A ROCK. HOW HAVE YOU NOT EXPLODED?”

He just groaned again. Stuart and I listened helplessly to his groans as they faded down the hallway.

After she’d gone off in the car with Remy, I began climbing down from the kitchen table.

“Where are you going?” Stuart said anxiously.

“The bathroom sink. Going to run a bath. Want to come?”

I had no inclination to strip down with him and compare jiggly bits, but since he was injured, I thought the least he could use was some help getting the water on and off. It was unlikely he’d manage on his own, being injured as he was, not to mention he was much less experienced in the gymnastics required to get around the house. I had since learned to scale the bathroom sink and turn the water on (using a jungle gym system of woven shoelace ladders which I lassoed up onto things). I put a lot of effort into demonstrating to Jennifer that I could get around on my own; my motivation being to avoid more adventures in the shower soap dish, or on the shower floor, gargling on her soapy pussy water…

“No, buddy,” Stuart said. “It’s okay. I just need a moment here alone to think. I’m not performing at peak at the moment. I need to go slow.”

I nodded, not the type to resent someone for wanting their alone time.

“Suit yourself.”

I had my bath and dressed, and when I came back, noticed Stuart was sitting by his – now comically oversized – phone and was talking quietly into it. He quickly ended the call when he saw me climb back up onto the table, but not before I heard him quickly say ‘love you.’

“Letting people know what’s happened?” I said.

“Uh. It’s just a relative,” he shrugged.

That surprised me; how quickly he was being mature about it. After I was shrunk, my immediate impulse was to shut people out, to prevent people finding out about me.

Jennifer came back with Remy.

He was lethargic from the anesthesia he’d had applied, and quickly went back to sleep on his sponge bed on the coffee table. Apparently the vet had to ‘pump’ him. It didn’t sound pleasant and I passed on hearing the details.

“WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS GUY, JERRY?” Jennifer said, aside, to me.

“Scott’s friend,” I shrugged. “He’s actually kind of fun when he’s not, you know, in the acute stages of nervous shock.”

Forgetting about Remy for a moment, she shrewdly noticed I had bathed and Stuart had not.

“LOOKS LIKE IT’S BATHTIME, BABE,” she said, rounding on him.

His eyes bugged out.

“Wha – ?”  he spluttered, and quavered under her growing shadow. “Honey…baby…no, I’m a little tender at the moment. I will, I promise, I can do it myself, I just need – ”

“STUART, LOOK AT YOU. YOU’RE IN NO CONDITION TO WASH YOURSELF. YOU CAN BARELY SIT UP STRAIGHT.”

He blinked rapidly, looking around, as if for a means of defense, and his eyes fell desperately on me.

“Jerry, you tell her – you tell her…uh…oh…” his voice raised to a whiny screech, “come on, man, help me out here!”

I shrugged.

“I offered to help you earlier, Stuart, remember? But if you want – ”

“I DON’T NEED JERRY’S HELP,” Jennifer interjected. “I CAN MANAGE YOU JUST FINE MYSELF. YOU’RE MAKING A HUGE FUSS OVER NOTHING.”

“Jen, I’m not screwing around here,” he pleaded, “any more handling from you and I’m going to break into tiny fucking pieces!” His voice was thin with stress, and didn’t sound like himself. He never lost his temper. It was kind of alarming.

But it didn’t move Jennifer. She was as cold as ice.

“STUART,” she sighed, folding her arms, “YOU CAN LET ME BATHE YOU, OR YOU CAN HELP ME PAINT MY TOENAILS, USING YOUR HEAD AS A TOE SEPARATOR – YOUR CHOICE.”

“You’re trying to scare me witless,” he frowned, “shame on you.”

“AM I? THAT LAST ONE IS ENTIRELY WITHIN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY.”

With no further argument, she swept him up in her hands – he shrieking his head off – and took him out of the kitchen. His voice wavered down the hallway, and then I heard Jennifer say: “SHHH, BE A GROWN-UP FOR ME, HONEY,” and his voice went abruptly silent. I guessed she had covered his mouth or something.

Remembering the firmness and even roughness of the baths Jennifer had given me, I cringed, but felt grateful the heat was off me.

For now.