Kimberly's eyelids lifted. The radio alarm was playing, she didn't know for how long. She turned onto her other shoulder to check the time. 9:06.

She turned off the radio and sat up, spotting the crib next to the bed. Alecia must have rolled it into the guest room before she left for work. Kimberly crawled to the edge of the bed and looked into the crib. There was Andy, sleeping peacefully like a baby, barely 2 feet tall.

She felt a warmth in the pit of her stomach that only a woman can feel. She resisted the urge to touch his cheeks, to pinch his little arms. "Wakey, wakey, Mr. Speed."

Andy stirred but did not wake. Kimberly puckered her lips and blew her warm breath directly on his face, ruffling his hair. He opened his eyes. There couldn't be many better ways to wake up. Kimberly's tousled, chestnut hair hung in strands, framing her beautiful, makeup-free face. Her bright, adoring eyes watched him intently.

"Good morning, Mr. Speed."

Andy stretched his arms and stayed reclined on his back, relishing the view. "Good morning, Kim. Did I oversleep?"

"I think we both did." Her eyes flickered down to his morning wood, tenting his boxer briefs obscenely.

Andy cleared his throat and rose to his feet. The crib bars came to just underneath his armpits.

"We need to hurry or we'll be late," Kimberly said. She reached out to pick him up, but Andy was already pushing himself up on top of the crib bars. Kimberly watched excitedly as he jumped to the top of the bed and then slid down the bedcovers, lowering himself arm over arm.

She smiled and knelt next to him, her knees hitting the floor on either side of him. "Do you need to use the bathroom, Mr. Speed?"

He gazed up at her pajama-clad form. "Uh, thanks Kim. I can still take care of that myself."

"Okay. I'm going to get dressed. I'll be in here if you need anything. We need to leave in 25 minutes."

Andy nodded and ran to the bathroom. He pulled himself up onto the toilet lid and urinated in the bowl. He walked around the lid and reached up to the lever to flush, even though you could hardly tell anyone had peed in there.

He ran to his bedroom and went straight for the bottom dresser drawer, the one with all his little clothes. Placing both feet against the dresser, he pulled on the edge of the drawer until it slid open a few inches. He vaulted over the side and found his clothes in the right size.

He wanted to eat something before they left, so he ran to the top of stairs and was about to jump down. But he stopped and looked at Kimberly's room. She thought he was still upstairs. If he wasn't where she thought he'd be, she'd have to look for him. He should at least tell her he was going to the kitchen. Better yet, he should just wait and go downstairs with her. This was part of his new thought process, to help others help him.

Kimberly's door was partly closed but open enough to allow him through. "Kim, before we go can I get—"

His mouth stopped working after that, as he witnessed a pair of blue jeans sliding up Kimberly's shapely legs and settling above the flare of her womanly hips. But not before he mentally recorded the pink panties that receded into the cleft of her butt cheeks.

Kimberly turned around as she was buttoning her jeans. "What, Mr. Speed?" As if him catching her in her underwear was completely normal.

"I was saying, ah, those are really nice jeans!"

She looked over her figure in the mirror. "Thank you."

"And that's a very nice blouse you have on, too." She would make any blouse look good.

"Thank you, Mr. Speed." She picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. "Are you ready to go downstairs now?"

Andy rode on her hip to the kitchen. She perched him on the counter while she got him a cereal bar and a cup of water, while making a quick snack for herself. She found the car seat and tried to install it in the backseat of her car in the driveway.

Andy was standing on the backseat, watching her struggle with the car seat. "Tighten this strap first. Now put your weight into the seat and pull hard on the other strap," he advised her, remembering how it worked when Brooke was little.

With the car seat finally secure, Andy climbed in. He gawked at the pillowy bulges of Kimberly's breasts as she pulled the straps over his chest and buckled him in. She stuck her tongue out at him and flicked him in the forehead with her finger.

"Hey." He tried to grab her, but his little arms couldn't reach her. He was strapped in, so he wasn't going anywhere until she let him out. Kimberly chuckled as she shut his door and got in the driver seat.

"Which way to the doctor's, Mr. Speed?"

"Your blood looks very average, Mr. Speed," the doctor said cryptically.

"Average is good," Andy said. "Can you tell how short I'll get?"

"Not until the analysis of the bacteria responsible for your shrinking is complete. We'll call you tomorrow with the lab results. But what I'm seeing here is a good red blood cell count, a good white blood cell count, a good iron count, no evidence of any other pathogens. You've told me you're eating well, it doesn't hurt when you urinate, and you've experienced no dizzy spells." He shut Andy's file. "For a shrinking man, you're in perfect health."

Andy let out a sigh of relief. "That's good."

"How have you been sleeping?"

"About 10 hours every night."

"Any midday naps?"

Andy shook his head.

"You're entering a critical period of your shrinking, Mr. Speed. Even though you've already lost 96 percent of your weight, the weight loss over the next 2 weeks will proportionally be much bigger than before."

"What do you mean?" Andy asked.

"Suppose that you shrink down to an inch tall. Well, given what we know about the pace of your shrinking, and how abruptly the shrinking starts and stops, you could lose over 80 percent of your body weight in that last day."

"That's going from 2 inches to 1 inch tall in 1 day?"

The doctor nodded. "Only about 20 percent of men get that small. You'd weigh a fraction of an ounce. You could literally mail yourself to anywhere in America for the price of a postage stamp. I wouldn't recommend it, though."

"People have tried that?"

"Sure. I've read reports of men trying to sneak on planes in their wives' carry-on luggage, another report of a man hiding in his wife's bra."

"Wait a minute. In her bra, like in the bra cup?"

"Sure, or in her cleavage, wherever he fits."

Andy's mind reeled. Alecia was flying to Virginia in a week. He imagined riding in her bra cup, his body hidden under her soft breast as she underwent one of those annoying patdowns at the TSA checkpoint.

"Anyway, Mr. Speed, what I'm getting at is, even though you feel tiny already, the worst of the shrinking pains is still to come. Don't be alarmed if you start sleeping 12 hours, sometimes 16 hours a day. That's rest your body will need when it starts burning energy to regrow. Have you made proper arrangements at home for your care?"

"Yeah."

"Have you taken advantage of the free counseling your health insurance provides?"

Andy scoffed. "I don't need a shrink. I just need my body back."

The doctor pursed his lips, looked ready to make an argument, but then let it drop.

"In my experience, Mr. Speed, it's about this time in a man's prognosis that he starts asking about sex."

Andy stared at him.

"In many cases I've seen, the man, if he's married or has an active sexual lifestyle, will try to abstain from sex until he's returned to his normal height. But there are two problems with this. One is time. Four months may not seem like a long time, but when you can't feed yourself, can't clean yourself, can't do anything without someone's help, that 4 months can drag on and on."

"What's the other problem?"

"The man's new stature presents novel sexual opportunities that are too irresistible to pass up. Now, there are pros and cons to sex at a reduced size. Care to hear them?"

Andy shrugged. "Why not?"

"I'll start with the pros. Number one, it's a great workout. Men can get lazy when they shrink, and who can blame them? They feel powerless, they have no control, no reason to work for anything. Number two, sexual stimulation makes you happy, and it makes your significant other happy. Sex produced endorphins that strengthen your body for regrowth."

"Okay. You sold me. What are the cons?"

"You could die."

Andy laughed.

"Seriously. I've had a patient die because his girlfriend crushed him under her butt. When the police asked her why she did it, you know what she told them? 'He asked me to.' Actually asked her to sit on him, someone 10,000 times more massive than him."

Andy wasn't laughing now. He'd almost been crushed without the benefit of having sex when it happened.

"So what do you recommend?"

"Have sex, Mr. Speed. Just don't be stupid."

Kimberly accepted Andy from the nurse and carried him through the waiting room to the car outside. "How'd it go?" she asked.

"I'm as healthy as a 2-foot man can be," he said self-deprecatingly.

"That's good."

He also recommended I have more sex, Andy was tempted to say, but didn't.

After they got home, Andy asked Kimberly to make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She ended up eating the sandwich herself and cutting off a quarter of it for him.

"I haven't eaten one of these since I was little," Kimberly said. She was sitting at the kitchen counter, while Andy was sitting on it, cross-legged, facing her.

"Are you saying little people have a thing for PB and J?" Andy said.

Kimberly smirked. "Aw, did I offend you?"

Andy regarded her. He liked the rhythm they were in. Now would be a good time to clear the air between them, which had so recently been clouded with sexual tension.

"I want to apologize to you, Kim."

She took a bite of her sandwich. "For what?"

"For my behavior the other day. Here in the kitchen. I was trying to do something I ought to not do."

Kimberly felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She was wondering when he would bring it up. "You don't have to apologize, Mr. Speed. You already told me why you did it, before it happened. It was my fault for… for thinking you'd want to take it further."

"I did, for a mad moment. I came very close to making a terrible mistake. It's to your credit that I didn't."

Kimberly keenly felt disappointment at these words. A "terrible mistake" is not how she would have described how she felt about him. To express her affection to the kindest, most handsome man she knew, that was not a mistake. But she knew what he was referring to: his family. He had a life with his wife and daughter that was more important to him than she was. Kimberly tried to suppress the surge of jealousy rising in her stomach.

"Well, it's not like you could have stopped me," she said thoughtlessly.

Andy shuddered. There it was, all her cards on the table. She was large and in charge.

He wiped a hand through his hair. "Even now, it's hard."

Kimberly's eyes darted to his crotch before she realized what he meant. "Oh," she said, sitting up straight. She had been eating with her elbows on the counter, the edge of the counter pulling her blouse tight over her bust, creating an impressive overhang. "Sorry."

But she wasn't sorry. She got a thrill from the way he looked at her, from being desired by him.

"Well, what do we do?" she asked.

"We both need to stay disciplined."

She stuck her tongue in her cheek skeptically. "Sounds simple."

Keeping her eyes on him, she pushed the stool away from the counter and planted her feet on the kitchen floor. She grabbed her dish and walked it over to the sink. She felt his eyes follow her across the room, burning into her backside. She prayed for patience. "Discipline, Mr. Speed."

Andy looked away. "Oh, right."

She turned around to face him, spreading her hands wide on the counter. "Your wife talked to me last night, Mr. Speed. She trusts me to take care of you. If I can't do that without you cheating on her with your eyes every second you're around me, this isn't going to work. I can't be responsible for your infidelity."

Andy clocked her chest before looking into her face. "Right, right."

Exasperated, Kimberly raised her hands to her neck and started to unbutton her blouse. "Does it feel hot to you?"

"What? Kim—"

"I must have forgotten to turn the A/C on when we got home." She unfastened the third button of her blouse and popped her collar, exposing her white bra and some dark cleavage.

"Kim, stop. What are you doing?"

"Just following your example, Mr. Speed. Would you like a better look?" She cupped her hands under her heavy breasts and pushed up, causing them to balloon cartoonishly up to her collar bone.

"That's enough, Kim," Andy said sternly.

She let her breasts fall back into place. Her face burned with shame and frustration. "You have no idea how it feels to be looked at by you. You can't keep flirting and then hide behind fidelity to your wife when I flirt back because you can't handle it."

Andy took a deep breath to calm himself. "What you and I are doing are not on the same playing field."

"You know what I mean. You compliment me all day with your seductive stares, then cry foul when I play up what you obviously find attractive in me. It's hypocritical."

"No it's not," Andy said defensively. "It's apples and oranges. You said it yourself, I couldn't resist you if I tried. Look at me. I can't do anything."

Kimberly balled up her fists, her blood boiling. "So this is your rationalization for making me responsible for all the… the stuff between us. It's more complicated than that, Mr. Speed. YOU have an effect on ME, too. And your size is not a license to toy with my feelings for you!"

Her voice rose to a shrill cry at the end of her tirade, and she ran out of the kitchen in tears.