In this way, the evening progressed. On screen, Jason’s impressive body-count rose and rose. And on Beck’s shoulder, Simon found himself becoming more and more at ease. He’d seen all the Friday the 13th movies a few times already, so the jolts didn’t scare him much; and the sound of Beck breathing was quite soothing—plus the little quivers of pleasure she gave whenever he adjusted his position against the hollow of her throat gave him an odd thrill every time they happened.

He wondered what it was like for her. Probably like holding a kitten, he decided. Or something even smaller, like a hamster. He knew his body temperature was naturally elevated as part of his condition; cuddling with him in this fashion was likely similar to using a heat-pack on a sore shoulder.

Soon came a slow section in the movie. Jason wasn’t killing anybody; the characters, boring cutouts that they were, were just talking to each other about their meaningless lives. In a way, Simon thought, they were even smaller than him. They had no real depth or purpose—only bags of blood on legs for the killer to carve up for his entertainment. He was more human than any of them…

“Hey… Simon?”

Beck’s throat vibrated as she spoke, startling him out of a reverie. “What’s up?”

He looked up at her; her face was still angled at the screen, and from his position he couldn’t really see her face in its totality. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

Simon smiled. Finally—she was comfortable enough to be curious. “Go on and ask,” he replied. “I’m an open book… for real. Anything you want to know.”

Beck took a breath, held it, then let it out. Clearly she was gearing up for something, something big. “I thought about it a while,” she said. “What I want to ask you. I thought about asking what it’s like to be as small as you are, but honestly I can imagine that well enough. Plus, you must get asked that all the time, enough to wear you out.”

Simon’s eyes widened. This wasn’t what he was expecting. “I guess that’s true…” he replied. “Do you think about that… a lot? About what it would be like to be small?”

“Not exactly like that.” There was a nervous giggle to her voice, and her face reddened slightly in the harsh glare coming off the screen. “It’s just that I’d never met a tiny like you before, but I imagined what it would be like. Meeting one, handling one. Even being close, like we are now.”

“Huh…” Simon scratched his head again, considering this. He’d never really spent time this close to somebody who wasn’t in his immediate family—his sister, mostly, or his mother. He’d never thought about it much himself, but how they were positioned now, nestled together, it felt…

What was the word? Intimate. At least, it felt nice. Like his heart was a candy apple inside of him.

“How does it feel for you?” he blurted suddenly, prompting another nervous giggle from the enormous girl who’s shoulder he was curled up on.

“I thought I was asking the questions—Mister Nosy Pants,” she reprimanded him. But that fidgety right hand rose up and, to his great surprise, actually cradled him for a moment, stroking him with her fingers. Then it retreated once more, resting on her bent knee.

“All right, all right. Fine. Ask your question…”

“I wanted to know… about you and your sister,” Beck said.

“Me and Milla?” Simon said. “What about me and Milla?”

“About… about that joke you made earlier. It made her laugh but I didn’t understand what was so funny about it. About you… walking down my… my…”

Throat, Simon finished for her—in his head. Why was she so reluctant to say it?

But outside his thoughts, he only shrugged. “Oh… That. It’s a little bit of a private joke, between Mill and me. An inside joke, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

Beck’s head turned only slightly, enough to look down at him from the corner of her eye. “I’m not following you,” she stammered.

“Seriously? Milla never told you about the lasagna scare from three years ago?” But before Beck could shake her head, Simon smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “No duh, Si! You didn’t even know I was a tiny—how could she have told you?”

“So what happened?” Beck asked.

“If you really want to know…” Simon hesitated. It was a little bit of a private story, and an embarrassing one to boot. Plus, it was almost as scary as a hockey mask-wearing killer axing coeds. But they were already pretty close… and something about the quiver in her voice, that begging shiver… it made him want to tell her. It made him want her to know everything about him. He’d never felt like that before, not once in his tiny life. So he said:

“All right—this is a little bit embarrassing, but I promised you an answer, so I’ll get you an answer. I told you already that I’m pretty tough for my size. Tough to squash, tough to swat, tough to break. Or tougher than you’d think I would be. Well, I didn’t get to be twenty-one without putting that to the test over the years. Even when your family and friends are super-careful, there’s a lot that can happen to a small boy like me. I’ve been smacked off tables, sat on, squeezed too tightly… you name it. But until my eighteenth birthday, there was one common tiny-specific accident that had never happened to me.”

Beck said nothing—she only stared straight forward at the TV screen, seeming to hold her breath. Simon continued on, picking up some steam now:

“It was my birthday, so I got to pick where we went out to eat. I’d never been a big Italian guy, but there was this new place in our hometown I’d been hearing all my friends from the colony talking about, and even though their tiny accommodations weren’t quite up to code yet, I begged my family to go. So we went—and it turned out to be the wildest night of my life so far.”

“Was the food that good?” Beck snarked.

“Just you wait and see…” Simon retorted. “Since they didn’t have food portions in my size, I had to order a full-sized plate of lasagna… probably my favorite Italian dish. So I’ve got to root around on this huge hot plate to tear off chunks of this thing with my bare hands you know? And I guess I must have ducked under a shelf of flat noodle or something. That’s when Milla decided she wanted to try a bite of what I had, and plunged her fork down into the lasagna… right next to where I was crawling!”

Beck gasped. “No. She didn’t…”

“Ask her yourself when she comes back,” came the reply. “She came this close to spearing me. I could literally feel the metal against my arm, I kid you not. It scared the heck out of me, but I didn’t even get a chance to scream—because when the fork went up, she got a big mouthful of my lasagna… and a big mouthful of me too. And I tried to scream to her, really I did… but it all happened so quickly. Before I know it, she’d stuffed me in her mouth. And nobody knew I was gone.”

Simon shivered a little, recalling the memory. It wasn’t a story he told often. But he felt duty-bound to complete it now—on to the strange and bitter end…

“Of course I was terrified,” he continued. “Absolute pants-to-be-darkened scared. But I wasn’t too scared to fight back. I got tossed around her mouth, smacking up against her teeth… it was a huge miracle she didn’t bite down on me while she was chewing. But every chance I got, I pounded with my fists and screamed. Not that it did me much good. I didn’t get bitten but she also never realized I was there… at least, not until it was too late.”

In Beck’s lap, that nervous right hand made a tight nervous fist. But the girl it belonged to said nothing.

Simon went on: “I never thought it would happen to me, least of all because of my own sister. But you don’t need to be a science major to guess what went down next… me. One minute I was sprawled out on her tongue, in the middle of all that chewed-up lasagna. The next: GULP. Down the hatch. She didn’t even feel me go down, how messed up is that? I’d never felt smaller or more scared than when I was inside Milla’s throat, sliding down inside of her. I thought that was the end of me for sure.”

“But… but you got out,” Beck stammered. “How?”

“Only a stroke of pure brilliant luck,” Simon reported. “My sister’s got incredible ears. She might not have felt me slip down her throat, but once I was inside her stomach, she was actually able to hear me calling out for help. I guess it was quieter inside her head when she wasn’t chewing. So before anybody else realizes what’s happened, she excuses herself to the bathroom, goes in a stall, and manages to spit me back up. I was only inside her for about five minutes. She cleaned me off, came out, returned me to my plate—and nobody was any the wiser. Even my parents don’t know it happened.”

Simon rubbed his cheek, staring up at the soft place under Beck’s chin. “So, we joke about it now. I guess tragedy plus time is comedy. Any time I talk about getting eaten, it’s a reference to that birthday. And it’s how Milla gave me my nickname.”

“Si? I thought that was just short for Simon.”

“That’s the freaky brilliant part. It is. But it’s also an acronym… S.I. Secret ingredient. Apparently… I, uh. I taste pretty good covered in marinara sauce. Granted, that’s a data point of one, but…”

“Your own sister told you this?” Beck interrupted, aghast—but this was mixed in with something else.

“My own sister swallowed me whole,” came the reply. “It kind of changed the dynamic of the relationship a little. If we can’t joke about it, then what was the point of it even happening?”

Beck had no answer to this. She just stared at the screen, looking past the screen, seeing—what? She seemed lost in her own world… in her own imagination. Simon finished up:

“So—that’s the scariest and wildest thing that’s ever happened to me. Not a lot of people know about it, either so… keep it under wraps, I guess? I’m surprised I even told you. But I guess there’s a first time for everything huh? Now, I think I get to ask you a personal question… since I’m such a great storyteller.”

“Huh?” This seemed to jolt Beck out of a daze. She shook her head, making her hair move in waves down her back, but not so much that it endangered Simon’s perch on her shoulder. “Uh… Sure I guess. What do you want to know about me?”

“I want…” Simon started to speak, then hesitated. “I want to know…” For an instant, words left him. And that song, that strange song from earlier, played over and over in his mind like a record skipping:

“Fear and delight, all the way through the night… Fear and delight, all the way through the night…”

But which was he feeling now? The fear? Or the delight? What made his heart feel like this?

In a faraway kind of voice, he heard himself say:

“I guess I want to know why the joke bothered you so much. Why I bothered you so much. I’ve met lots of people who get skeeved out by tinies, but a lot of them are jerks or careless people who don’t want the trouble of having to watch where the step or set their drinks down on the table. But you… you’re like Milla. You’re careful. You’re considerate. You’re…”

“You’re making me blush,” Beck cut in—and indeed she was.

“You’re you,” Simon pushed through. “But in spite of all that, you’re still so… agitated around me. I want to know why that is. Are you… scared of me? What’s going on in your head, Beck?”

Playfully, he stood up on her shoulder and, reaching up on his tip-toes, tapped the side of her skull with his pointer finger, just next to her ear. She giggled at his touch, the ear wiggling a little bit as her lips pulled back in a nervous smile. “Stop it… I don’t want to tip you off of me,” she protested. “I’m not… It’s not that I’m nervous because of you. Or that you… that you make me nervous.”

“All evidence to the contrary,” Simon said, walking his fingers along her skin, across her cheek.

“You’re… Oh, you’re doing this on purpose! It’s not… I don’t feel agitated. Not really. It’s not…”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s… It’s…”

But if Beck was going to say more, she never got the chance. Suddenly on the TV screen, Jason lunged into view, waving his machete. The music was a squeal and a shriek of harsh strings. Simon jolted and cried out in fright and surprise, but that was nothing compared to Beck’s reaction. She sat forward suddenly, her whole body seeming to convulse with the shock. And it sent tiny Simon toppling forward…

And then he was falling, falling, falling…

The brief sensation of freefall startled him for sure. But Simon knew, in the back of his mind, that he was safe. He’d bounce off the front of Beck’s sweater and fall in her lap, or between her legs on the sofa. He’d fallen from greater distances and popped back up, right as rain.

He knew he was safe. But he had no idea how safe he truly was.

He hadn’t counted on Beck’s sweater sagging quite so low at the neckline. So instead of bouncing off, he suddenly plunged into warm cramped darkness. Headlong, Simon plummeted towards her cleavage; then his momentum plunged him suddenly between her breasts and into the warm embrace of her titanic bosom. He didn’t even have time to cry out before the soft, pliable flesh completely swallowed him up and he disappeared from view.

High above him, Beck gave a surprised yelp as he vanished between her breasts. She immediately shoved her hand in after him, but as her bosom separated to give her room to search, the pressure on Simon released—and he slipped even deeper into her warm depths. He felt his mind go strangely blank. The smell of her, that same heady scent of her lotion he’d smelled on his hand. It mixed with he warmth and the darkness into an intoxicating cocktail. His eyes almost rolled back into his head, and he felt…

A stirring. Down there… something he’d never really felt before in that way.

It confused him. It frightened him a little. But it felt good, so good, good like nothing else had before.

Fear… and delight. With a little derring-do, I’ll fall in love with you…

But surely this could not be love. He didn’t know this girl, not really. And this was no way to fall in love with somebody, swallowed up whole by their bosom after a cheap slasher jump scare. But then, what was the feeling that was making his whole body feel shivery and sugary? Did it have a name? Had anybody ever felt like this before in the history of the world?

But even this reverie could not last. With a determined yelp, Beck finally managed to get her hand into position between her breasts, prying them apart with the other hand, stretching the fabric of her sweater’s neckline in the process. Her fingers closed around Simon’s sticking-up leg, and she fished him out of her bosom, holding him directly in front of her face.

She filled his vision like a huge full moon, down to her pale skin and eyes. Again, the only spot of real color in the entire display was her huge red lips—and from that angle, Simon got his answer. He could see his reflection in the curve of her pouting lower lip. But it was her expression that captivated him most in that moment. She was out of breath; it came in warm huffs from between those ruby-colored lips. And she was staring down at him with alarm… and intense interest as well.

It was almost desperate. It was almost angry. It was almost hungry.

“You asked me why you make me so nervous,” those huge lips said, in a whisper that still blew back his hair. “Well… that’s not what I feel. That’s not what I feel at all…”

Beck took a breath through her nose, held it, let it out slowly.

“I’m not nervous around you,” she uttered in a voice that seemed to come from deep inside her.

“Simon… I think… I think I’m turned on.”