You lie back at your full height, freshly showered and clothed with your eyes shut tight, and your head resting in Ellie’s lap as her fingers slow-dance through your hair.
Her dorm bed is cushy, though secretly no comparison with her tongue. You could fall asleep in your friend’s mouth, and you know it’s no joke because it happened once when Ellie was too tired from the day to swish you around, and you awoke to find yourself face-to-iris with those gray pools of her eyes staring you down and trying not to laugh.
You would do just about anything for this girl. If she picked you up and asked casually about whether she could place you on her tongue and never remove you again, you probably would say no, but you would have to at least consider it for a second. You know this can’t entirely be a hyperbole because the scenario has entered your dreams from time to time, and almost nothing before has felt so startlingly real to you.
She’s not a fool, and neither are you. What you have now is not like an ordinary friendship. Even though the idea of shrinking human beings has been ingrained into society’s conception of reality for going on twenty years now, what you do isn’t exactly normal, or at least wouldn’t be to anyone else. For the both of you, there’s as much calm in it as there is in what you’re doing at this instant with your head resting against her denim-clad thigh.
You can’t say for certain what it is you feel for her. Maybe you’ve simply become infatuated with the way you feel around her, so you decided a while ago to not risk asking and damaging what you have. That’s the line, and you’re sticking to it, no matter how much your subconscious has been prodding at you of late to think on it. You can’t know for sure, but you imagine something similar is going on in her head. Part of you wishes desperately for the unspoken to be reversed, but the rest of you is too scared to ask.
Yet here you are, ostensible friends, lying on the fresh white sheets of her bed with your head cradled across her legs while she plays with your hair with one hand and skims through a chemistry book in the other. You haven’t said anything to one another for at least fifteen minutes, and neither of you is made uncomfortable with that fact. With her fingertips sliding across your head, scrunching around your bangs and then slowly releasing them between her parted digits as they glide soothingly back across your scalp, you feel you could just melt, and to speak might interrupt the essence of this peace.
You can see her eyes are following the words on the page, but her sharp mind is always on the move, and she couldn’t possibly have this much finesse in her fingers if her attention wasn’t occasionally diverted to you as she massages the top of your head with such endless care. As you look up, you watch her palm pass over your eyes again in preparation to stroke your hair, imagining it at titanic scale with the exact same fearless revere.
The dying glisten of the sun that’s spread through the open window creeps through the rippling locks of her honey-colored hair, dappled here and there with darkness. Patterns you could lose yourself in. You love her hair, but it’s almost redundant to admit to yourself, because you love everything about her.
Maybe even Ellie herself, but still, the thought of admitting that to yourself is too terrifying.
It’s only been thirty minutes since she finished her chemistry homework and plucked your worn-out form from under the baking, mammoth blanket of her tongue, declaring that you had had enough, because she wasn’t going to be responsible for you becoming too sore simply for her amusement. She sounded apologetic, seeing as how the pair of you had stretched this out further than ever before: forty minutes, all told, straddling her tongue in the blackness and letting it marinate you in her luscious mouth juices.
All you could do was joke right back at her, but this time she was serious, carrying you to the bathroom in her cupped palm after ensuring no one else was around. In short order she had brought you back up to an even six feet tall with the press of a button and a quick green flash from her Portable Matter Reduction Device: the newest model of the year, which had been so streamlined in its design, it might easily have been mistaken for a digital camera.
“How do you feel?” she’d asked as you sat on the scuffed countertop of the sink, as though you were a patient with mysterious aches visiting a clinical physician.
“Great,” you’d said with a swallow, lying a little out of guilt, and then hung your head, knowing she could see right through you the instant her eyebrow rose up. “A little tired, though.”
“I thought so,” she’d sighed with disappointment. “You shouldn’t have talked me into putting you back in. And I shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s okay,” you defended quietly. “I can take it.”
“Uh-huh,” she had said with a disbelieving shake of her head, hands on her hips after she had pocketed the small tablet-sized shrinking device again. “Why don’t you come sit in here with me for a while after you get cleaned up?”
“It’s fine. I’ll be fine. I have to get some homework done,” you’d said, not necessarily lying now, but not wanting to appear even more to long for her attention than you’d probably already made yourself look. That’s the last thing either of you needs.
“You’re staying here with me for a while,” she’d repeated adamantly, clearly not making it a choice, as she turned and walked the twenty-something paces back to her dorm room to give you some privacy to shower.
You couldn’t help but grin to yourself.
God, she’s magnetic.
“What are you looking at?” she accuses suddenly as you gaze up at the light through her practically sun-shimmering locks, though through her intentionally abrasive tone you sense her kidding. Her eyes don’t even leave the page, and confirm for you how much she notices without it seeming so.
“Your hair,” you admit without thinking, careful not to come off as flirty. That’s ground you don’t want to stand on.
“My hair,” she repeats back with a half-smirk. “Something wrong with it?”
“No. It’s just the way the light hits it. The way it trickles in. Like… liquid sun washing through,” you answer truthfully. “I like it.”
“What are you, some kind of poet now?” she snorts, knowing you only get into these loopy word rambles when you’re exhausted. Her hand has paused in its path through your dark hair, and now she’s simply thumbing the same tuft back and forth until she’s practically got your brain in the palm of her hand, even if she can’t have your body at this moment. You are absolute putty at her touch.
“Maybe,” you shrug. She knows you like to write and ceaselessly teases you about it, though you still notice her eyes giving strict attention to the scribbled words whenever she manages to convince you to let her read some of it. You’re bashful about it, and the fact that she’s so blazingly intelligent makes it even worse. You’ll never understand fully what she could want with you and your fluffy ramblings.
She tilts her head and pouts her lips, clearly fighting the urge to roll her eyes, and her hand continues moving again in your hair, but this time her fingers trace their way down your temple and to your cheek, where she clasps her palm to the side of your face. Her skin is warm and inviting, and once again you can’t help but feel transported back to a size where every crease in her skin is a valley to you.
She sighs, leaving you both in silence again, and you wonder if there’s something you should say.
Should you try to ask her?
You’ve locked eyes now and you can tell there’s something you both want to say, but you’re far too petrified. And despite how, right now, you feel safer than you have before, possibly in your whole life, why shouldn’t you be?
Then the words come from her soft lips with a final tiny motion: “Do you want to stay tonight?”
It’s less terrifying than you were expecting, and you both instantly understand what the words mean.
They don’t mean sex, and more importantly, they don’t mean what you both feared was coming, so a collective sigh of relief is shared.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she responds, closing up her book at last and setting it on the bed. Her freed hand slides back into her pocket while her other continues to caress your hair, and retrieves the PMRD. She bypasses the security with a password and a thumbprint, then clicks through the settings, the light from the touchscreen reflected in her glowing eyes like furrowed storm clouds.
There’s a certain humorous irony you can’t help but miss now as you watch her work in preparation for this calmly platonic night in the same room.
For everyone who knows the pair of you, or at least thinks they know you without actually knowing the slightest thing about either of you or your desires, it’s the public assumption that you’re both at least bang buddies if not already embroiled in some deeply passionate romantic affair.
Neither of you has put in the effort to try and deny it, because to explain the truth would take far more time and understanding your friends probably don’t have. In the lunchroom, at study group, and before class, when the pair of you sit together as often as you can, you’re made the constant subject of good-natured and curious jokes due to your total lack of PDA, as though you’re purposefully hiding something from everyone.
If your subconscious, and that odd silent look in her gorgeous gray eyes, were any indication, you’re probably hiding something from even yourselves.
“How small?” she intones softly.
“I don’t care,” you answer truthfully. “It’s your ray.”
“It’s your body,” she retorts.
You shrug. “I trust you.”
A shudder almost goes through your body. Despite the phrase being a radical redundancy, considering what activities the pair of you usually engage in, this is probably the most provocative thing you’ve said all evening, and you instantly regret it as your eyes meet in a strange flash.
You didn’t mean it in the sense that you know she won’t hurt you; that’s been well established. You said it in the simplest, broadest way that means so much more, and she knows it too.
“Thanks,” she says, her face expressionless with surprise at your bluntness but her voice lulled and sweet as magnanimous summer air.
Maybe it wasn’t something to regret after all.
A few more taps on the screen as the miniature barrel extends like a camera lens, and her eyes widen at you to ask if you’re ready, which of course you have been for several minutes. You close your lids for the green flash and actually allow yourself to savor the telltale chill that runs under your skin while shrinking, because despite the heat the PMRD takes from you, as you lie on this bed, with your head in your friend’s lap, everything sort of evens out.
You become aware that Ellie’s hand, which had moved to the back of your head, is becoming your whole world, swallowing you up until it’s not just your head but your entire body cradled in the center of her palm, smooth as cream and scented faintly of a flowery lotion, the tiny lines running like a road map in all directions around you.
Her fingers curl upward as fleshy spires, protectively forming a wall despite the fact that you know her hand wouldn’t budge unless the earth itself started trembling violently enough to topple buildings. You can’t say for certain, but you’d assume you’re back down to a half an inch.
You know you’d trust her just the same at a tenth of that.
“Well,” she sighs, her voice musical and booming at once while still managing to soothe your trembling frame as you readjust to chilly life at the size of a fingernail. “Let’s get you tucked in.”