He must not tell her that in the future she would leave the school and give a shrinking device to Frances Woodfield, as that knowledge may corrupt Colleen’s personal timeline. Miss Woodfield had told him about it, when she’d explained things after shrinking him, but Colleen didn’t know. With his hair dyed and his body shrunken to tiny size and wearing his weekend casual clothes, he would hopefully be unrecognisable to her, and could satisfy something in her that Miss Woodfield had mentioned, when explaining Colleen’s reason for inventing a shrinking device in the first place. When he saw Miss Balfour walking along the path, he was about to step out and let her see him. Then he saw the past self of Miss Woodfield walking behind her, talking to her as they walked. He couldn’t take the chance on letting her see him, as that would really put the timeline at risk. So he used the wrist remote’s recall setting to pull him only one day back in the direction of the present. He arrived one day later than he had the first time. This time, he saw Colleen approaching alone, and waited until she drew closer, and then sneezed.

She heard it, turned and knelt down.

“Well, it looks like I’ve found another delicious little leprechaun,” she said, “Would you like a kiss, before I take you home and gobble you down?”

“Yes please!” he said enthusiastically.

As far as his three crushes went, he had one on Miss Woodfield, a stronger one on Miss Balfour, and the strongest one of all on Miss Corlani. He had enjoyed Miss Woodfield’s licks on the first night that she’d shrunken him, and would enjoy Miss Balfour’s gobbling all the more.

Colleen picked him up and pressed her full lips closely to his face. Then she put him into her handbag and walked a while. When she reached the woods, she took him out of the handbag and let him ride in the neck of her turtleneck sweater, with his head peeking out the top, so that he could see the journey she made through the wood and up through the meadow to her house.

When she had him warmed up in the oven and served at the table, she sat down and looked down at him. She reached for him with a casual gesture of her hand. He saw her elegant fingers separating and drawing close with her perfectly formed palm, and then the whole hand closing around him, leaving only his head free to look up as she drew him up towards her face. Then he saw her incredible tongue come out of her mouth. It was wide, rounded at the front, and had no gaps on the top, a truly awe inspiring tongue to behold after being reduced to tiny size. He felt the tongue sliding over his neck and face a few times, and then saw it returning into her mouth.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say, before I swallow you?” she asked.

“I guess just to thank you for the lovely kiss.”