It was the afternoon and sea birds squawked overhead. The plain of turquoise ocean was foaming like whipped cream with the coming of each surging wave crest.

Down past the boardwalk we followed a path along the shoreline of the bay, to a bench looking out at the snowy waves. Taking a seat, Jen placed me down on the grainy wood benchtop. As a stream of people sauntered down the path past us, I cowed against the meaty wall of her thigh, as if for protection.  

As Jennifer flipped through her phone, there came gritty scraping as footsteps crossed the path, heading towards us. I looked up.

Natalie was wearing sunglasses and a bikini, without clothes her body was slender and willowy. She walked hand-in-hand with a man heads taller who had a towel slung over one shoulder and a slight paunch. Their pace slowed as they approached, both looking Jennifer up and down. Neither had seen her before.

Then Natalie’s eyes fell onto me and went tender and warm.

 “JERRY! HOW ARE YOU NOW?”

“Busy. But fantastic. You?”

Her lips pursed and her head tilted to one side.

“FRAZZLED,” she huffed, “BUT TRYING NOT TO BE. EXAMS.” She introduced the man:

“GRANT.”

I smacked a hand against my fiancée’s outer thigh.

“Jennifer.”

She stood to greet them properly while Natalie’s eyes had narrowed on me, receding into analysis. She dropped onto one knee, bringing her face down to my eye level. I was only wearing swim shorts and she wasn’t staring into my eyes, but at the faint scar line running over my bare abdomen.

“YOU HAD A HEART OPERATION,” she said through a squint.

“No, that’s just…” But that had been an excellent cover story, and in my haste to answer I had just blown it, “…just a minor accident at home.”

This was not reassuring. Her breath sucked in and she bit her lip.

Jen was radiantly mischievous.

“DON’T BE FOOLED BY THIS MAN,” she said. “AT HOME HE THINKS HE’S AN UTTER BADASS DAREDEVIL.” Her thumb aimed between my shoulderblades and gave a small shove, making me stumble a little.

“GOOD TO MEET YOU, FINALLY, JERRY, JENNIFER,” said Grant, in his crackling low timbre. His gaze lingered on Jen’s bikini-clad form. He gave a curt nod. “NICE FIGURE. VERY BAYWATCH.”

With a start, I realized he was talking about me. I had no words. Nice figure? Overstatement of the century. More like, nice figurine.

Across the shore, a volleyball was piffed over a net.

Giving Natalie a sideways glance, Grant’s immense shadow rippled as he bent right over me, feigned letting me in on a secret:

“THE GIRLS DON’T UNDERSTAND. IT TAKES PAIN TO GET WHERE YOU ARE.”

“You got that right,” I grimaced, maybe agreeing with him for a different reason.

‘The girls’ pretended to ignore this exchange for different reasons: Natalie trying to ignore my life necessarily entailed pain, Jennifer ignoring that Grant assumed she wouldn’t understand something because she was a girl.

Grant was well-proportioned himself, his face squared and angled, hair perfectly parted. He looked like one of these guys who headed student societies at SPU. Then again, Natalie seemed like a student committee girl herself. He put his arm around her shoulders and pecked her cheek at the appropriate times.

We carried on down the path along the Boardwalk. Walking behind Natalie and Grant, who were admiring the Boardwalk –which Natalie had not seen in a while, and Grant had never visited – Jen fiddled with me a little, adjusting and re-adjusting her grip, as if she was anxious. She was not. One cautious, sensual fingertip made a passage over my belly, running a nail with delicacy under the waistband of my little swim shorts, and making a small scooping motion for my shaft. The prickling of her long nail tips was like tiny insect bites all around my torso, I wiggled around, which seemed to amuse her even more. The nail slipped out by accident, but resolutely peeked in again under my swim pants.

With a cool burst of shame, I realized what she was doing, and began to panic, staring around at the beach without really seeing any of it. She was checking I didn’t have an erection since Natalie had shown up. Despite my insistence that we were merely friends, she must have sensed something between us, the flicker of a flame that had not yet burned out. She was perceptive like that. Or paranoid. If I thought our engagement would squash her jealousy, I was wrong.

My heart started to thud and I wrestled with her hands as the fingertip kept returning, trying to tweak my manhood to gauge its firmness. Finally, desperately, I gave up and stopped moving. The determined fingertip pushed around my balls, taking the shaft beneath the weight of its pad, and satisfied, left me alone again.

We secured a picnic bench looking out towards the water. A row of stalls and food houses extended along the opposite side. Grant and I waited at the table while Natalie and Jen went and got some food and drink to bring over.

Next moment I was being prodded awake, just in time to hear Natalie’s concerned inquiries about my heart, dismissed by Jen, who was only slightly more able to hide her concern, but not much. Under the bright sun, I must have started to nap. At least, that’s what I told them. Some Kolade perked me up and I was back online. We talked and ate.

Grant cleared his throat.

“YOU GUYS ARE TOGETHER, TOGETHER,” he looked between us for clarification. “HOW DO YOU—?”

“WHAT GRANT IS TRYING TO SAY IS,” Natalie interjected, bumping her shoulder into his, “DATING SUCH A SPECIAL LITTLE MAN LIKE JERRY MUST COME WITH CERTAIN OBSTACLES TO...ROMANCE.”

"THAT HAS NEVER BEEN JERRY’S STRONG SUIT," Jen shook her head dismissively, "OUR FIRST DATE, HE TOOK ME TO THIS WESTERN RESTAURANT, A COWBOY THEME, she exclaimed, "IT WAS BIZARRE, AND SO UNROMANTIC I ALMOST WENT STRAIGHT BACK OUT.” She looked down at me, pursing her lips in a smile. “AND THEN WE WOULDN’T BE SITTING HERE. BUT HE SHAPED UP.”

“She’s lying,” I piped up. “She wasn’t going to leave. She had to ride the mechanical bull,” I explained, “…for the third time.”

“NOT WHAT I REMEMBER, BABE,” she saidlightly.

“We couldn’t leave until she’d mastered it.”

Natalie let out a polite chime of laughter.

“YOU GUYS MAKE A CUTE COUPLE.”

As she said this, her pinky finger lifted and comfortably wrapped around my bicep, giving it a quick squeeze, as if she’d done it many times before. An easy, friendly gesture, and if I’d been normal size, she would have squeezed my arm with her entire hand. Realizing this, my insides blushed, and I couldn’t help but think by ‘cute’ she was specifically referring to my half of the couple.

Even after Natalie’s hand departed again, Jen’s eyes were suspended on the space where it had just been. Then she sipped her drink serenely.

"ARE WE ROMANTIC?" The unspoken end of this question: ‘…enough?’

"That’s a luxury I don’t have a lot of time for anymore.”

"IN MY CASE IT’S EITHER ROMANCE OR SCREW IT.” She shrugged. “AND SCREW IT WINS. BUT WE STILL DO DINNER TOGETHER, AND JUST HANG. JERRY IS A BIG FAN OF JUST HANGING – LIKE, FOR INSTANCE, FROM MY PONYTAIL. OH—" she stared down at me, "—YOU HAVE SOME FOOD ON YOUR..."

Halfway through a mouthful of Kolade I slapped a hand around my face with impatience.

"AH, NO, BABY...RIGHT THERE--"

She dipped her head, in a flash jabbed the tip of her tongue into my cheek with a sharp poke. Drink spurted out of my nose in surprised embarrassment, and she straightened in her seat, laughing and rubbing one finger up and down my back as I coughed and panted.

Natalie and Grant glanced at me, startled.

We went down to the beach, found a bare stretch of sandy carpet to claim as ours. Natalie and Jen lay down on the sand, Natalie on her back, Jen on her front, and Grant sitting upright. I was dumped over Jen’s shoulder, to sit just below her scalp. She bunched her hair over one shoulder to keep it out of my way.

They talked as I remained quiet, feeling extremely shy. Now that Jen had recognized the depth of my feeling to Natalie, anything I said could be potentially used against me later: that Natalie used to bath me in the sink like a baby rabbit, or playfully ‘toe wrestle’ me on her bed.

Jen was saying:

“…I RUN OUT THE DOOR ON GRANOLA AND YOGHURT.”

Natalie offered:

"JENNIFER, I KNOW A BREAKFAST SMOOTHIE THAT’S SUPER QUICK. SOMETIMES I DRINK IT WHILE DRIVING TO WORK."

A bottle of lotion came after me, rudely spurting its contents at my feet until a glistening puddle lay squarely between the massive shoulderblades.

“HELP ME OUT, BABE,” came the casual utterance, in between a conversation with Natalie and Grant. “THOSE HARD TO REACH SPOTS.”

Getting down on my belly, I took a deep breath, shutting my airways to the lotion’s overripe coconut perfume, and began to roll back and forth in the runny spill, coating my entire body. The surrounding flesh gave a small appreciative shiver. An insect droned past but the lotion aroma drove it away.

When I looked up, Natalie was watching me with a small smile that was remorsefully amused, as if she wished my predicament were not so funny. Catching my eye, she reached over and stroked her pinky up and down my face to wipe dollops of lotion and clear my vision.

I launched forward, doing a mudslide right down to Jen’s tailbone, leaving a trail of lotion, and coming to a rest at the curve of her posterior. In response, she hunched her shoulders and drew in a deep breath, my passage over her back tickled slightly but for now she tolerated it, so I could fulfil my lathering duty.

Crawling on hands and knees, I retraced my path back up her spine to the back of her neck, and once more slid down the smooth slope of her back. Working up and sliding down slowly smoothed the lotion into her back.

"HONEY," Jen continued, getting into the generous spirit, "I COULD TEACH YOU A MOJITO THAT'D MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE."

“OHHH…” Natalie drew breath sharply as if to say ‘don’t tempt me.’

Treading and crawling around the small of Jen’s back, I massaged the lotion around, and her butt cheeks firmed, sending a faint ripple through the bikini bottom. Spitting out some lotion, I said:

“She used to work in a bar.”

“WE’RE BOTH ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW,” Grant muttered, leaning towards Natalie, “WE DON’T NEED THE EXTRA INDUCEMENT TO DRINK.”

Natalie turned in her seat to him with a small encouraging smile:

“IT IS SEMESTER BREAK…”

With so much lotion now coating Jen’s back, my next flight down her spine was fast and frictionless. In an instant, her glorious ass cheeks grew immediately in direct view until they blocked out the sky, and it seemed like a pair of mattresses clapped in on either side of my head, making everything go black. As I rotated my head, the lotion squelched and smacked, but otherwise I couldn’t move.

Then something pinched my ankles and gave a gentle tug, but too gentle, it escaped my slippery body, and came at my ankles again. It tried this three more times before finally getting enough grip to retract me with a tiny wet pop that played deafeningly in my delicate ears.

Lying on my front, the massive globes of ass rose over me. directly below my face was the top of the tight ravine separating them, just visible over the bikini waist, a plunging, suffocating drop which my head had just been plucked free of, and not by Jen’s generosity.

Natalie's soft finger alighted upon my head to pet me, but accidentally pushing my face down, and with the lightest ease, my lotion-greased head slid perfectly back into place between the ass cheeks. The world seemed to shrink into a dark skintight sheath.

There was a small gasp, and once again my ankles were anxiously pinched and pulled, until my head burst free again. I blinked up at her through a white mask of smudged lotion. Trying not to laugh, she looked away.

My face had grown very hot with a blush as I wondered what it must have felt like to Jen: that I had pushed my head into her crack twice, and wiggled around, for no apparent reason. Her thoughtful silence was almost worse than laughter.

Grant had changed the topic, still fascinated by my size and asked how I managed getting around the house.

Jennifer answered:

“WE HAD DOOR ELECTRONICS PUT IN. JERRY’S FUND TOOK CARE OF IT.”

“OH,” said Natalie, perking up, “SO YOU COULD HAVE ALL KINDS OF THINGS—”

“LIKE, LIFTS, STAIRS, RAMPS,” Jen listed off, “YES—BUT HONESTLY, WE DON’T NEED IT. JERRY LOVES CLIMBING. VERY GOOD AT THAT, BABE,” she cooed down at me, “AREN’T YOU?” There was something concealed in her voice.

Natalie’s mind was working away now:

“BUT YOU COULD HAVE A WHOLE PREFAB FLAT SET DOWN FROM SCRATCH WITH ALL THE FACILITIES IN SCALE.” Her face shone with the revelation. “PICTURE THAT, JERRY;” she said to me, “OPENING THE DOORS, USING THE FURNITURE.”

I’d never thought of that before. Four walls and a ceiling to fit, a tasteful shutter on the giant, noisy outside world.

“Cool.”

I said it without thinking.

Jen had gone silent. In my peripheral vision, her head bowed over her straightened hands, one resting flat over the other, the clear polish of her nails glinting under the sun as her fingers flexed. She was twirling the stick of an icecream, trying to look like she was thinking though she’d already made up her mind, possibly a long time ago.

“IF YOU MEAN 'COOL' AS IN…'COLD'," she muttered.

"It’s an option,” I said. “Not saying I actually want to live in a tiny house." But even to me the way I said ‘want’ sounded strained and forced.

"HOW DO I VISIT YOU, HUH?” She shot back. “HOW DO I EVEN TAKE A STEP THROUGH –"

I burst out laughing, unable to help myself. She reached back, nimbly found my skull between forefinger and thumb squeezed it enough that I made a small sound. Once free, I crawled down and rested against her butt, out of her reach.

Her back flexed impressively, and when she spoke her voice was impassionate.

“I SUPPOSE IT MAKES TOTAL SENSE ON PAPER, BUT PERSONALLY I THINK IT’S A LITTLE RIDICULOUS TO EXPECT JERRY TO DOWNSIZE INTO SOME KIND OF GINGERBREAD HOUSE IN THE BACKYARD.”

Natalie stared at Jen, puzzled.

“IT WOULD HARDLY BE, LIKE, A DOG KENNEL,” she giggled a little at the mental image. “IT WOULD BE A RESPECTABLE PLACE OF RESIDENCE FOR A SLIGHT-STATURED ADULT MAN. REMIND HIM HE’S NOT SO LITTLE, YOU KNOW?”

“JERRY IS LITTLE,” Jen said, swatting an insect out of her face. “IT’S A FACT OF LIFE.”

“Swimming,” I said, bounding up Jen’s back, “who’s game?”

Everyone went quiet. Natalie and Grant stared at me, their brains whirring with vague probabilities.

Jen arched her back, lifting herself onto her forearms like a graceful Sphinx. My feet went shooting out from under the lotion-slicked floor of her back, tumbling head first towards the mount of her rump, face sliding right down the gentle crease of her spine, the mount of her rump seeming to rise up over my head. With a small wet squish, my lotion lubricated face slipped snug into the uppermost portion of asscrack exposed just above the pantyline. Again.

There was a sharp jostling back and forth and I came free. She had given her butt a tiny, irritated wiggle to dislodge me. Then I was plucked clean into the air as she got to her feet.

“RACE YOU TO THE WATER,” she said to me. It was a joke; I was stuffed in her fist, with my head peeking out, but trapped stubbornly under the weight of her thumb. She was gripping me extra tight because I was as slippery as a wet bar of soap. Her thumb pushed down on my head affectionately, and the weight made my neck groan.

Grant jumped up. Natalie stood warily, her eyes scoping Jennifer’s hand, identifying my tiny face peeking out from beneath her thumbnail, like I was a lighter and my head was the switch.

She worried the sea was too big and open for me, but Grant found an inlet, like a finger of turquoise water at a right angle to the sea, bordered by sandy rock walls, where the water was placid with no swells.

The water was cool and the sun warm on the top of my head. I had my arms stuck in some tiny inflatable rings, and floated about, unable to swim very fast, and constantly poked in the back by one of the three to steer me around. Sometimes Jen plucked my head up between forefinger and thumb and manouvered me around in the water like a chess piece. Their splashing cast hails of briny water drops over my head, in my eyes and mouth, while the motion of giant bodies sent out waves that spun and bobbed me about madly and unpredictably. In order to have fun I had to relax and let their swelling currents drag and pass back and forth like a helpless bath toy. I tried to remain in the shadow of one of the women, but not so close that I was in danger of being accidentally kicked or paddled.

Jennifer casually mentioned that I could hold my breath for at least nine minutes. Actually, it was only eight minutes, she had mistakenly tacked on an extra minute.

At this, Grant proposed they see who could hold their breath the longest. Jen swiftly took him on. Natalie was reluctant, looking to me as if for permission. The gentle appeal in her eyes, as if my opinion had some kind of power over her, had me lost for words. It occurred to me that if I’d asked her to leave the water with me, this instant, and take me back to the car – or, potentially anywhere else – she would have done it without question, possibly over Jennifer’s objections.

Noting Natalie’s concern, Grant’s low, dull voice broke the moment:

“JERRY’S THE JUDGE: WHO’S UP FOR AIR AND WHEN.”

The sun’s glaring warmth seemed to beat into my skull.

“You don’t think I can?” I shot.

“JERRY,” Natalie said pleadingly. “YOUR HEART.”

Jen’s figure treaded up to me, and bringing her face down very low in the water to look straight into my face.

“YOU’RE BASICALLY AQUAMAN,” she murmured, very low. “YOU DON’T NEED TO PROVE ANYTHING TO HIM.”

Below the surface, my groin was given a teasing stroke by the back of a nail, as if to remind me of potential I had unknown to Grant. I relented.

The three of them got into position, counted down, and submerged.

I started counting. I was bobbing with every wave crest, suddenly all alone on the sea as the gentle waves scrolled by. Then the quiet got boring. I kept counting.

The coast appeared as I ascended every wave crest, then rose away. It was far ahead of me, too far to swim. Treading, I circled away from it, and focused on the horizontal blue ribbon out ahead, trying to find where the sky met the ocean, but at my size, the emerging wavefronts kept it hidden. So I watched the wavefronts to anticipate each oncoming flush of the tide.

The water grew darker. My pulse quickened. As I stared down into the inky depths below my feet, I wondered if the sea was thick with shoals of fish. Or bigger creatures that could snap me up in one bite.

The darkness seemed to shift around, surrounding me. It was too coordinated to be a group of creatures. My stomach churned in knots as I watched it.

There was a roaring sound as a wave of water stirred and foamed right in front of me. I sucked in a breath as the wave expanded into me, sending me tilting into the water and bouncing back up again. A giant pair of bare feet had parted above the surface in a kick and darted back down, like a whale’s tail smacking just above the water. The spray flew up and rained down a second later.

Who was that? I had no explanation: the three of them were all supposed to be holding their breath, not swimming around.

Then I realized I’d lost count. It didn’t matter.

Right before my face, a massive, round shape thrust up above the water, sending me into a mad bobbing action. I shielded my body as a pair of enormous eyes emerged from the sparkling blue depths, followed by the ridge of a nose, and then a big pair of shining wet lips. The entire head emerged, lifted up by a long, slender neck. The giant figure only stopped once her shoulders showed, just hovering above the water level. Her skin shone under the sun, and a short, gleaming mane of reddish brown hair ran back over her head. She flicked it back, whipping flecks of water over me.

I treaded helplessly, becoming acutely aware that, the shadowy bulges of the woman’s colossal chest lay, scarcely contained in the stringiest bikini possible, like a pair of underwater boulders straining against ropes, and each dark protruding nipple standing in the cold water. The underwater shelf was practically below my feet.

Where were the others? They should have been below me. In fact, they should have surfaced by now. At my size, the ocean looked never-ending. It was difficult to gauge where I was. I must have drifted away from them without realizing, to the end of the inlet, or even beyond. My thoughts began to whizz in my head like a disturbed flock of birds. How far had I drifted?

The woman made a noise of surprise and glided backwards. The swell of her receding motion tugged me towards her as if by an invisible bind.

Now I could see her face again; her expression went from surprise to inquisitiveness, blinking at me as if trying to figure out if I was real. Her mouth opened – anticipating an expression of remorse for startling me, I raised my hand, preparing to wave off her apology – just as the air charged with her blaring voice:

“OH MY GOD! JERRY! JERRY MOUSSEAU!”

My hand froze in the air. I twisted around, trying to make distance with an inelegant, panic-driven freestyle, my body whipping and jerking more than paddling, fighting the tilting green surface at every instance, which suddenly seemed thick and unyielding like slippery sand.

“WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?!” the woman’s voice rang out behind me. “YOU HAVEN’T GIVEN ME AN AUTOGRAPH YET! THERE’S A PEN IN MY CAR – LET ME TAKE YOU!”

My heart raced as the water splashed and rippled behind me. I urged my body into overdrive but the inflatable rings – designed to keep me safe – were now hampering my escape.

There was no time to react. I just caught sight of the glimmering wet fingers as they closed around me and ripped me out of the water. My heart was no longer just hammering away, it was in freefall.

 “SO I KISS YOU AND IT’S GOOD LUCK,” the suggestive trill of her voice hammered into my ears, “OR SO THEY SAY.”

Blinking and staring, I was struck dumb. I’d never heard anything like that before. But people could be saying anything about me online. I tried not to Google myself.

Before I could ponder it, I was flying up into her rapidly magnifying face, while her shining wet lips dived down and smacked around my face like two pool inflatables. Just as quickly the vacuuming pressure departed, her head drew back and bowed over me, giving my body an up and down inspection.

“SO,” she began, “IS THE OTHER RUMOR TRUE?”

Her eyes honed in on my groin, and a finger uncurled from my body and pushed downwards against my swim shorts.

Then stopped as a voice barked out:

“JERRY!”

It was Jen’s voice. If you didn’t know her very well you’d think she sounded angry. But I knew the urgent growl in her voice actually meant she was afraid.

The woman’s head swiveled around, and then rested upon me, smiling smugly.

“LOOKS LIKE I GOT YOU FIRST! NOW…” her eyes were drawn along to the mouth of the inlet, where it met the rocking wave wrests of the ocean. She looked like she was making mental measurements, and then made up her mind. My stomach crumpled up in utter, dismal dread. Clutched in her hand, I was helpless as a landbound fish.

Jen’s voice resounded, even more urgently:

“JERRY—!”

I let out a shriek:

“Jennifer—!”

“…CATCH US IF YOU CAN!” the woman gloated.

With a cymbal-like crash, the world collapsed forward in a powerful dive. My head was thrust underwater.