“Thanks for the view,” he called, “You look better than ever.”

Ingrid absorbed the compliment, and then slowly angled her tongue upward, so that he began to slide, but not steep enough to obscure his view of the mirror. He slowly reached her throat, and stopped just inside the upper part of it. He recalled the powerful gulping with which she had easily despatched him in the past. This time he had an incentive to fight against that. He stretched his body out as much as he could, and pushed against Ingrid’s throat.

He was still incredibly aroused, despite the danger he was in. He heard a laugh coming up from her throat and realised she was about to gulp. Ingrid had a far more powerful advantage, and he was trapped inside her, no matter how things turned out. Yet he wanted to prolong the adventure for as long as he possibly could, knowing that once she had succeeded in despatching him to her stomach, she would go on with her life and hold him only in her memories.

Ingrid began to gulp, and he felt the incredible pressure. For her, it was merely a gesture which took a minimum of effort, he considered. She would be sitting at the table enjoying the process, while he fought with all his strength to keep her from gobbling him down any further.

Ingrid’s throat was wet. He realised that he was in fact still pressed against her tongue. Though not visible from the outside, the tongue starts somewhere down inside the throat. It was hard to gain any friction when pressing against it. Percy felt himself slipping further down.

Then he suddenly felt his legs get caught in some opening. It was not below him, where he had been gulped several times before, but beside him. Percy pushed with his hands, and his legs went into the opening. Then he lost his grip, and his upper body fell over, dangling into her throat. He reached up with his hands to pull himself into the opening, and then eased his whole body into it.

He was surrounded by a soft inner part of Ingrid’s upper body, which was moving constantly. He felt the air, and then deduced where he was.

“I’ve made it into her lungs,” he thought, “She can’t swallow me any more now. I can’t ever get out, but she can’t ever gulp me down to her stomach either.”

Ingrid must have known what he had done, but was powerless to get at him. The safest place for him had turned out to be within her own body.

“My turn to say touché,” he heard her say, “But at least I’ve stopped you recalling yourself to your machine.”

For the next few weeks, he lived in her lungs, occasionally crawling out to the opening while she was eating, to catch pieces of falling food while they were still fresh, long before they would otherwise have reached her stomach. They sustained him, and allowed him to lie in her lungs and think about her.

One day she started speaking again.

“I’m constantly aware that you’re in my lungs,” she said, “I can so often feel you there. It makes it hard to put the thought of gulping you down out of my head. I’ll make you a deal, and you can trust me on my word of honour about this. I’ve never lied to you, have I, regardless of how menacing my conquests of you have been. I’m going to lie down. If you come into my throat, I’ll let you climb towards my mouth, and then turn you loose in the garden. I’ll go inside for the rest of the day, and make no effort to hunt you down until the next day. If you can make it back to your machine before I find and catch you, I will marry you. If I catch you first, I will use your machine to make you just a little bit smaller, so that you can’t slow your fall in my throat. Then I will gulp you down so fast that you’ll never have a chance to escape to my lungs again. If you think that such a challenge would put an end to this stale mate, I’ll expect you to climb out soon.”

He thought for a few minutes and decided that it was worth it either way … especially since he had an advantage. He didn’t have to make it to his machine, but only to the ring. She didn’t know about it.

“Good to see you again,” said Ingrid, as he emerged from her mouth onto the pillow beside her head.

“You look lovely as ever,” said Percy.

Ingrid took him down to the garden and put him down on the grass. Then she lay down on her stomach with her face right in front of him, resting on her hands. She had brought him down in her right hand, but he noticed something which took his breath away. Ingrid had removed her engagement ring and replaced it with his homing signal ring. He remembered that he had last left it on his bedside table. She must have chosen to wear a piece of his jewellery that no longer signified engagement, when she found the ring, and had no knowledge of its power to rescue him from her mercy.

Now it would be so much harder and riskier to get at it. He had to get close to her, which involved the greatest risk of recapture, in order to do it.

Ingrid gave him a slow farewell kiss.

“Good luck. You’ll need it,” she said, and true to her word, she got up and went inside.

In the days ahead, Percy made a rope from fallen small garden vines, and tied it to a hook from a suitably shaped large twig. He managed to hook it around various structures in the wall far below his upstairs bedroom one day, and climbed each stage, until he reached the balcony. He slipped under the door and climbed up onto his bed and hid under the bed clothes and waited until Ingrid went to bed that night.

He had positioned himself on the far side, where the sheet and blanket were always tucked in, so that she would not notice him or roll onto him as she slipped into the bed. In the darkness, he heard her huge incredible body settling beside him, and then waited until he could estimate where her left hand would be.

He knew that she would be wearing the ring. It would have made things so much easier if she had been in the habit of removing it while she slept, but he knew from their last meeting, that she must have been wearing it while she had been lying down to allow him to take up her challenge. He must not let her know that he was anything other than a rumpled portion of sheet, as he felt about for the ring. To that end, he would always grab a bit of sheet, rumple it himself and use it like a glove, and touch her hand ever so softly, as he felt about for the ring.

It was awesome to consider that he was playing with a hand that could easily grip him inescapably, if she learned he was there. At last his hand came to rest on the ring. He could grip it just a little more strongly and without the sheet, because she would not feel it unless it moved, unlike the effects would have been of him touching his own skin against her actual fingers. Her hand seemed to be on its side at the moment. He ran each of his hands down either side of the ornament until he felt the circular ring itself.

He tensed up, anxious and considered the scale of the risk he now had to take. From what he could hear, she had fallen asleep during his search. Yet the moment he tugged on that ring, he would awaken her and alert her to his presence. He had to be able to activate the homing signal the moment he got the ring off her finger, and before she could grab him.

He tensed himself, prepared to act, and then stopped. It took him several attempts to summon up the determination to go ahead. He finally considered the alternative: hiding out indefinitely, if she didn’t find him first.

Percy wrenched the ring from her finger, felt her stirring and saw some light as she turned on the bedside table reading light. He put the ring around his neck, as it would not fit anywhere else, having not been reduced with him this time, as he saw the bedclothes pulled off. Ingrid sat up instantly, revealed in light in a beautiful nightgown. In that split second he saw her beautiful giant face gaping down at him with a mixture of realisation and resolve. He turned the ring, and the signal did its work.

“So that’s your-…” he heard her say, just before he was taken from the bedroom to reappear at the machine.

He knew that the remaining words of her sentence would have been “way of activating the recall mechanism.”

He heard her stepping out of bed and running to the door. She would be down the hallway and enter the laboratory in less than a minute. He felt for the controls in the darkness, as he heard Ingrid running down the hallway, and threw the full-sized ring away from the machine, which restored his full size just before she burst into the room. Percy dived for the ring and put it back on his finger.

“Don’t worry, darling,” he said, “I believe this means you’ll be able to start wearing another ring again anyway. If I let you stay, can I take your word that there’ll be no more spiking my food and drink with sleeping pills?”

“I promise,” she said.

“I’ll really enjoy walking down the aisle with you after this,” he said.

“In a way, so will I,” Ingrid sighed.

He put out his arms for a hug, and she met him half way and they were soon kissing.

Several nights later, they were snuggling together in his bed.

“I really enjoyed the chase that night I hunted you down and caught you in the TV set,” she said.

“I can look back on that with some fondness too now,” he said, “What I really miss is being eaten over and over.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, “They were all you, but that only makes it better knowing I kept eating you, thinking it was a permanent conquest.”

“I can’t shrink myself anymore, now that you know. You’d have really gulped me down forever and had a happy life without me, if you’d won, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but I’ll just have to settle for a happy life WITH you,” said Ingrid.

“That’ll have to be good enough for both of us,” said Percy.

Half an hour later, Ingrid spoke again.

“What if I gave my word again each time?” she said.

“You mean, to let me go after each ‘eating game’, so we could do it again,” said Percy.

At this stage, they had known and loved and outwitted each other for so long, that they had that rare ability of couples to finish each other’s thoughts and sentences.

“I admit the deal is loaded slightly in your favour. You’ll get all the gobbling thrills you like out of it, without ever having to pay the full price,” said Ingrid, “But I can pretend it’s forever each time, and then let you recall yourself. I’ll never shrink you without you wearing your ring. At least I’ll get to eat you over and over again.”

“Ingrid! I don’t know what to say.”

“I guess I owe you a concession, after all you’ve done for me, all you’ve been through for me. To think that you saved my life at least once, knowing what I didn’t at the time, that I had eaten YOU, when I was dating that creep. We could have some great hunts and chases in that large lovely set of gardens you have here? Will you trust me to always eat you only temporarily?”

How nice it would feel, in the months ahead, to be re-introducing Ingrid to his friends as her fiancé, and to be preparing to marry her; now that things had turned out this way.

“Oh Ingrid, I love you more than ever. What a marriage we’ll have!”

“I think so too, and Percy, I love you more than my ex-husband. I always will. If I had gone on to marry someone else after you’d been consigned to my stomach, I’d still have loved you most of all, though my way of showing it would have been different.”

“Those are the two most wonderful things that have ever been said to me, and I’m going to give you a concession too. I know from things you said during our encounters with Colin Geoffries and the Kings Cross drug lords, that you’d be much happier without my Sneaky Spy activities. I know now that they were the substitute source of adventures for me, begun when I thought I’d never see you, let alone be eaten by you again. I neither need nor want that lifestyle now. I’m going to stop.”

“Thank you, my love,” said Ingrid and kissed him passionately.

Two months later, at their engagement party, Ingrid and Percy were standing alone together in a corner of the room. Percy lifted a large prawn towards Ingrid’s mouth.

“May I do the honours?” he asked.

Ingrid opened her mouth and practically sucked the prawn from his fingers.

She swallowed it and then gave a quiet laugh.

“I’ve just realised what occasions like this must have been like for you all those years between our teens and our reunion,” she said, “You couldn’t have gone to any party and watched any pretty girl eat anything, without dreaming of riding her tongue, and any other girl would have let you into her mouth without gulping you down, I’d expect.”

“That and your greater beauty are what make you so special. I never showed that machine or my shrunken self to anyone else. I only ever thought of riding tongue with you.”

“You are so sweet!” said Ingrid, “I could just … eat you all up!”