Giantess World
David took all this information relatively in stride. Indeed it did sound insane as she’d warned, but since he was living the proof of Alex’s magic suitor-punishing powers right now, he couldn’t exactly disbelieve any of Claire’s explanation. Most of his bewilderment dissipated, knowing that the actual reasons for his condition were just as surreal as the act of turning into her glove itself, replaced instead by freshened panic. His friend sounded so certain that she could save him, but as Alex still wasn’t answering her phone, there was no telling how long David would have to put up with this mind-warping state, and just how close to that point of no return they might be brought before it was all resolved. Despite the life-threatening importance of turning back before Claire’s memory was altered, though, a lower-order concern nevertheless made David internally flinch, and then telepathically blubber out:
“Claire, I didn’t mean to… uh… you know. Set it off. I’m really sorry if I did something wrong. You’re my friend, and I-”
“Oh, goddammit, David, don’t go APOLOGIZING, when you’re the one who turned into my glove just because Alex is so fucking insecure!” Claire groused. “Of course I know this isn’t your fault. You were just being nice! But somehow what you did was still enough to trigger it. How could you have known about this, though? You couldn’t have! You have to believe me, too, that I would’ve stopped you sooner, just in case, but she must’ve made it so I wasn’t even thinking about her goddamn magic trick until it actually happened. There’s no use talking about it now, anyhow, since we just need to get ahold of Alex. We could go looking for her, even though I don’t know where she-”
“Wait. No. I don’t know if I can… take that,” David interrupted.
The concept alone of venturing out of here almost sent him into a pre-emptive sensory tailspin, just envisioning all the doors Claire would have to push open using him, the steering wheel she’d have to grip, the people she might bump into, and became immediately afraid of the future leather-pinching pressure, climbing oven-esque heat, and concentrated sweat fumes as gritty glove-jam was rubbed off from his body and smeared into her warm skin. And that was before even considering that his friend would probably have to take off her glove to respond when Alex did finally answer her emergency messages, which would again exile him again to the ground, wrapped around her moist increasingly-putrid sock foot as that mushy-insoled New Balance: another hellish variation to endure on top of everything else. If his senses were placed into such wild overdrive just during the simple acts of Claire walking through the stock room or unvelcroing his body from her hand, David imagined the turbulence that would result from a meandering hunt across town for his coworker’s apparent witch of a girlfriend just might push him too far over the edge to be brought safely back, when and if his human shape was ever restored.
Realizing he couldn’t stomach the voyage, the tone of David’s consciousness turned more frazzled and unhinged with every word he thought toward her: “Please. Please, please, don’t. I know we have to find her, but if she’s not at your house, or at work, but we still had to go ALL that way, together, with me like this, I don’t think I could take it. It’s hard to describe, what this… feels like… but it’s bad. It hurts and it’s hot and itchy and it smells funny and… and…”
“God, I didn’t even think of that! You’re right, David. I’m sorry,” Claire soothed, likely hearing the bubbling misery in her friend’s thoughts, and probably correctly guessed that putting his glove-body through more trauma than utterly necessary would only accelerate his mental degradation. “Don’t worry, we’ll stay right here, and be ready for when Alex calls back. Which she will. Listen, I… know all this is a lot to handle, but since we can’t just tell everyone here what’s going on, maybe I should just get back to work? I just won’t use YOU for holding or carrying anything. That way, we’ll stay busy, maybe keep your mind off all this… craziness… and you can still let me know how you’re doing. Okay?”
“Okay,” David sighed within. His preference, really, would’ve been for Claire to hide in an air-conditioned corner of the décor store, with her gloved hand raised and her fingers unbent, so as to minimize his torment. Instantly, though, he chided himself for thinking so selfishly, when his friend was just trying to keep him safe and occupied in her care until his salvation, while also not sacrificing her standing at their place of employment. None of this was her fault, after all. Just bad luck, and the result of an obscenely over-protective supernatural S.O.
For the next hour, David was a clandestine passenger for Claire’s morning duties around the shop. As she’d pointed out, there were a lot of responsibilities waiting for both of them today, and now she’d not only have to pull double duty since he was uniquely indisposed, but she’d have to do it with only one hand. Keeping this in mind, David didn’t hold the slightest grudge as Claire hustled around the store, craftily managing tasks using her left hand, with only minimal involvement from her transformed coworker. In time, he found he could steel himself against the inherent violation he still felt at having her fingers fully elongated through the pipelines of his artificial anatomy, and could even mostly-ignore the smaller gestures like finger-curling and palm wrinkle snags that were essentially unavoidable for someone wearing a glove, even one they weren’t using to carry anything. Claire had at least been right that staying in her presence, knowing that she was aware of him and looking out for him the whole time in this deranged scenario, indeed helped take David’s mind off some of the milder side-effects of serving as protective garb for her hand.
At first he tried to soothe himself with a short bout of comparative psychology, reflecting on that inexplicable attraction he felt toward Claire’s appendages while in human form, the desire he sometimes felt to hold them tightly in his, or feel her fingers stroking kindly across his face. However, even internally admitting this to himself, and recognizing how much he liked his coworker’s hands, it still wasn’t nearly enough to make him remotely enjoy the less-than-subtle downsides of existing as a mitt clasped humidly to an animating five-pronged creature which lived independently inside his leathery shape like a possessed skeleton. Plus, there was also the fact that Claire could read his thoughts whenever he intuited them too pointedly, and in shameful fright of having to explain this quirk if she heard him thinking it, he forced that idea out of his mind, choosing instead to weather the hidden tribulations of a busy workday spent as her glove.
Because of course, even though Claire wasn’t using her right hand for the organizing and heavy-lifting necessities of the job, her left side was toiling so much, that the overheating effects of her efforts were eventually experienced body-wide. Just past the hour mark, David could feel practically every square inch of the giantess’s palm and finger pads turning tacky with pumped-out layers of fusty perspiration, clinging to half his interior surface like wet clay and refusing to release the hold. This again unnerved him, as it allowed him to “see” the exact plush geometry of Claire’s palm and digit segments like a photo negative, as the softer-fleshed side of her hand was practically suctioned by dripping soppiness to his malleable frame. Though this glove-bottled sweat was gladly much less zestily acrid than the sour influx of sock fluid he’d briefly suffered as her shoe before, what it lacked in cheesier toe-grunge flavor, it made up for in that rank melting cowhide odor borrowed from his own foreign body, as the inside of the glove began to weep grayish-black throughout the grooves of her hand flesh like cried-over mascara, only with sweat colored in by the grubby dust of the transformed man’s interior lining, and it absolutely stunk to high heaven.
“Eeeeasy does it…” Claire would mutter under her breath when no one else was around, nodding warmly to her right glove, which helped curb David’s worries to a certain extent, even despite the mounting queasiness from his gradually sloppy interior and its distinct dewy leather B.O. “Nothin’ wrong here. Just taaaaaking our time.”
Goofy as it might’ve seemed for Claire to be lullabying David with these assurances while carefully avoiding the use of her dominant hand, he quickly found he missed her calming croon, when two hours into the day, she seemed to think he no longer required this emotional support system, and stopped speaking to the glove-man altogether. This brought on an odd form of lonesomeness for David, contradictory as that sounded while her sweat-pruny hand was more intimately adhered to his insides than ever. What made him feel most insignificant of all today, though, was the first time Claire accidentally lifted a shipping box using both hands. It wasn’t the heaviest thing she could’ve chosen to pick up, but nonetheless enough of a burden that an entire inward-facing half of David’s transfigured form was abruptly pressurized so hard between the torque of her palm and clawing dig of her fingers in order to support the weighty cardboard prism, that he could actually feel his already-pliant corpus thinning like a wet sponge placed under an industrial presser.