Giantess World
Still, what might’ve been strangest about this lengthy arc of time was Claire’s unusual failure to remove her glove at much more regular intervals. Normally she was popping it off every chance she had, to text or smoke or even just air out her warm hand, but David’s coworker didn’t even doff her protective wear for her lunch break today. Not that he was about to complain about this, since the alternative meant carrying her perspiration-pregnant sock inside his empty shoe-shell while getting ruthlessly pounded under the giantess’s weighty stride for hours on end. Still, with what little clarity of mind David had remaining after so many hours of pain and revulsion spent as her glove, it struck him as odd.
“Goddammit, they really need to up our hourly, if they expect us to do this much on our own,” Claire mumbled with friendly commiserating annoyance to her transformed glove-friend, out of the clear blue sky, as she milled about near the back employee exit. “It’s not like I can freaking wingardium leviosa all this stuff.”
“C-CLAIRE?” David squealed with unbridled joy. He even telepathically laughed, despite the ongoing nauseous agonies inherent to being her stuffy pummeled dust-caked work glove, like a shipwrecked survivor who’d just been spotted by a passing barge. “Y-You know me? You can hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you!” she snickered, raising her eyebrow in confusion at the inhuman red-black being snuggled Velcro-tight around her own hand. “We work here eight hours a day, Monday to Friday. I’m pretty sure we’d be pretty shitty at our jobs if we couldn’t even communicate. You know the drill. I do the heavy lifting, and you keep me covered. We make a really solid team, don’t you think?”
Ironically, even though David could finally be heard again, he was left speechless. Joyful as he was to know that his anonymous eternity as her clothing hadn’t begun prematurely, which meant there was still time for Alex to undo this, Claire’s happy-go-lucky response to this rediscovery had thrown him for such a loop that for a wonderful moment, he failed to experience the salty grit-washing sharpness of her hand’s exerted flavor, or psychologically wince as she casually waggled all her fingers back and forth inside him. What was happening here?
“No! I m-mean… y-yeah, usually, but…” David stuttered inside, flabbergasted. “You… do know… w-what’s wrong here, d-don’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, usually we go out back more often so I can have a smoke break and get you some fresh air, but there’s just so MUCH to get done around here, I can barely keep up! Hey, if you’d been born with your own hands to help me carry all this shit, we could be done twice as fast. But you weren’t, and that’s not your fault, David, that’s just how you were made, so we make do,” Claire replied, just as friendly but disaffected. “Look, do you want me to take you off for a little while so you can get a little siesta? Not gonna lie, it’s going to be a little bit of a goddamn bummer not having my partner-in-crime to help me pick things up, but if you really need the breather-”
“NO!” the glove-man repeated in a frenzy, just as Claire pinched the Velcro strap in her fingers.
“What’s gotten into you?” the giantess queried, concerned at first, before adding with a chuckle: “Besides my hand?”
“CLAIRE!”
“Aw, c’mon, you know I’m just teasing. That one always makes you laugh.”
“This – isn’t – real! O-Or… it is… b-but it’s not RIGHT! This isn’t NORMAL! This is all because of the c-curse! Alex’s curse, that she put around you, that t-turned me into a-”
As though her recollections had all returned with the force of a freight train, Claire screamed aloud, cupped her mouth instinctively with David’s duress-laden glove body, and had to steady herself against a nearby wall to keep from outright collapsing. Even before she spoke again, the giantess’s transformed coworker could read the sorrow and horror in her expression again. While it was unsettling, to say the least, that her mind had inadvertently wandered so far from their current plight, no-doubt another side effect of Alex’s anti-cheating measures, David was at least relieved to be back on the same page with his friend, seeing as how she was the only person standing between him and an eternity spent as her sweaty battered-down work clothing.
“Fuck…” she apologetically exhaled, shaking her head, then purposefully used her opposite glove to wipe away the glassy moisture welling in her eyes. “David, I don’t even know what to say. It… that, what I was saying before… just felt so real, it-”
“Don’t worry,” David bravely assured, even though he himself was on the verge of a mental breakdown due to catastrophic worry. “All that matters is that we can fix this before it happens again. F-For good. Please, I know she hasn’t been answering, but can you try calling Alex one more-”
“God-ugh-DAMMIT!” Claire yelped suddenly, wheezing desperately mid-obscenity, and this time failed to catch herself from falling, as she slumped to the floor against the wall, flinching like she’d been sucker-punched in the lungs. Both her gloved hands were splayed out to the sides to soften her fall, which unfortunately for David, meant a swift digit-spreading collision with the hard gritty backroom floor, sped up by the forceful descent of the giantess’s tumbling body mass. There wasn’t even time for either party to remark on this painful gesture, however, as Claire was plainly laboring now to a horrid degree, hacking for breath and uncontrollably thrusting Heimlich-style. Her cheeks seemed on the verge of going blue. “I – ungh – can’t… b-breathe! F-Feels… like f-fucking withdrawal, but – argh – the… w-worst… I could e-ever-”
“It’ll be okay! Just light one up! Hurry!” David coached, abruptly having to offer his friend comfort now, even as his own pangs and olfactory sufferings continued.
Clutching her chest with the other glove, Claire nodded, then scrambled back to her feet and stumbled out the back door into the loading dock. There, she struggled to retrieve the lighter and cigarettes from her pocket while her hands were shaking so hard and her air had become so choked. With the tools balanced against her shoulder, Claire conscientiously chose to remove the glove that wasn’t inhabited by her friend’s spirit, being as delicate as possible with David while pinching the thumb and forefinger portions of his bodily tubing around the opposing Velcro strap. Or at least she tried, but after several repeated yanks on the glove, first to disengage the fabric latching, and next to just wriggle her hand out of its binding, all while grunting with effort and gasping up the last of her air as though it was taken through a straw at the bottom of a swimming pool, the glove refused to budge, like it had been welded to her skin.
“W-Why… won’t – hheeuugh – it come OFF?” Claire rasped in panic. Again she fell to her haunches on the concrete, struggling to hard to breathe while also fighting pointlessly against her left-side glove. David couldn’t answer at first, as it was strenuous enough just having his outer rubbery skin digging and pinching against his mirror-image twin, more ferociously with each second as Claire’s perspiration-gushing hands tremored and flexed within him, and he wasn’t even the glove she intended to remove. Her next move was to pinch the cigarette between her still-gloved fingers, foregoing her usual habit of a barehanded smoke, but before she could even light the end with her friend’s gift, both objects tumbled out of her grasp as though slicked with butter. This forced her to scramble after both slippery objects while still whooping and drooling from the artificially-addictive furor, trying to pick the lighter and cig up one-handed and finding it more difficult somehow than scooping up wet marbles with chopsticks. In a flash more striking than the innard-stretching strain on his leathery physiology or the constant binge of leathery perspiration sponging out of her flesh like a lost sailor’s fatal binge on seawater, David inherently understood what was happening. This was just another insane but intentional piece of Alex’s codependent sorcery, like his clothing-hopping sentience and Claire’s flaky memory.