Dinner goes without event.  Julia doesn’t say a single word to us, not even when lifting us out of the house and setting us on the table.  Bath time goes the same way.  Not a word is spoken as we are soaked in the bowl and dried off.  However, as per tradition, I am last.  Julia looks down at me a little differently before she makes a move.  She sighs gently, not even really in an apologetic way, but almost in a way of regret.  For the briefest moment, it occurs to me that she’s gotten over her little “moment” from earlier and is intending on finishing the job she came so close to doing earlier, but I force myself to keep my cool. 

                I made it this far, I’m not going to let it end now.

                She leans forward a little, catching herself with both hands on the little tray table I’m standing on, setting her fingers splayed out on the table several feet away from me.  I look straight up at her, but I can hear her fingers tapping loudly away on the table, can feel the vibrations they send through the table and to my body.  She looks straight down at me, her hair hanging down and obscuring part of her face.

                “How are you doing, Jack?” she asks.  There’s no waver in her voice.  She’s clearly not reeling from the fright she gave me earlier.  This is cause for mild alarm, but I still manage to keep it together.  Freaking out in any way would just fuel the fire, I tell myself.

                “I… uh… good…” I say, not entirely sure what the correct answer is.

                The standard reaction.  She tilts her head and purses her lips, bringing one hand up from the table to quickly brush the excess hair out of her face before bringing it back to rest on the table.

                “Are you sure?” she says in a way that begins to border on the condescending and hesitant yet firm response to, say, an elementary school child.

                “Yes,” I say with a little more confidence, nodding my head hard enough so that she can clearly distinguish my answer.  Her face doesn’t really change, but I feel like she’s accepting the answer for now.

                “Good.  I’m glad to hear that.  But I do think we need to have a little chat…” she says simply, using no inflecting.  My chin moves down from staring straight up at her face to back to eye level, and my eyes are met with her fingers curling in midair, preparing to grip me.  I’m up in the air and at her eye level a moment later. 

                She’s not squeezing the living shit out of me; I suppose that’s a good sign. 

                She doesn’t say anything, but instead saunters slowly over toward her bed, or at least I think that’s where she’s going.  I twist around as far as I can and see it fast approaching, although I can’t turn that far around since she’s gripping me in a forward facing direction tightly enough that moving anything below my shoulders is difficult.

                She slides easily into a sitting position, then both of us are rolled back as she goes into a laying down position on her bed, resting her head on a pillow.  She shifts her grip on me from the gentle fist into the pencil hold, where her thumb and middle finger grip me by the chest.  Slowly, I am raised up and placed on her horizontal crossed right leg, which is resting on her left one.  I feel the warmth of her bare skin under my rear end as I take a seat, letting my legs hang down, and I can feel the muscle within the thick layers of skin and tendon.  I look over to my right and see her pink sock-clad foot, slowly twisting around.  Her ankle cracks after a moment of this.  My gaze goes back to her.

                It’s odd, but she seems sort of far away now, even though she’s technically right underneath me.  She gives me a calm smile, but nothing overt.  Her hands go behind her head, using them as extra cushioning.

                “Comfy?” she asks after a moment of a staring contest.

                “Yes…” I say.  I wouldn’t dare answer in the negative.  I’m guessing this is another way for her to feel in control, since I have to actually try to maintain a sense of balance while sitting on here, although I’m not in a huge danger of falling since her leg is so massive compared to me that even being halfway on her calf, I have a little ridge where the muscle breaks off inside her leg to use as a sort of seat.

                “Good,” she says, while simultaneously flexing her calf.  It shifts me upward, and it’s a little scary to feel the floor go rock-hard before settling back into a softer groove, as if reminding me that relative to my size, she could probably lift a dump truck with no problem.  I jitter for a moment, my hands searching for some imaginary object to hold onto, trying to use that cut-off point between her calves and the rest of her leg.  Her legs are perfectly bare, so it’s not like there’s even little hairs for me to try and grab onto.  She obviously shaves them, possibly out of slight embarrassment at how easy it would be for the five of us to see them at our size.  I see her mouth widen into a big grin as I struggle for a moment. 

                This conversation is just peachy already.