“Christine, this… really wasn’t necessary,” Nick mumbled, his bashful grin punctuated by hopelessly flushed cheeks. “You know that train could’ve gotten me to you in about ten minutes flat.”

            “I know, but… well, now it’s seven extra minutes I get to see you, isn’t it?” the Omega replied as she delicately strolled down the central concrete thoroughfare, her gentle footfalls only sending out the slightest of reverberations through the earth as a token of her fourteen-story stature. Her violet eyes, catching the fading sunlight with an ethereal additional shade of indigo, flashed between the leftover rush hour traffic far below and her rigidly poised hand, upturned and fenced by slender fingers. In the deepest valley of her palm, a being short enough to have passed through her pupil reclined against the fleshy crease.

            “I guess that’s true, yeah,” the young Beta chuckled, bracing himself on the cushioned dune of his carrier’s palm to remain steady. As usual, it seemed she’d recently applied a fresh coating of lotion to her skin, making the newly lubricated terrain a pleasure to sink into. Not to mention the sweet aroma that arose from the peachy ground. Today it was some variation of coconut-lime, a personal favorite of hers.

            Blinking, Nick could just barely make out the stars not smothered by the remaining sunlight, flickering between the sweeping chocolate locks that hung in such endless cataracts from Christine’s head.

            “Plus, the food’s ready and piping hot. We wouldn’t want it to get cold and push back dinner just in case the train hit a delay.”

            “Right, yeah. Don’t, uh, want that,” he agreed, and though he meant every word of it, the three-inch suitor couldn’t help but gulp down an anxious, sticky lump in his throat. Miniscule as it was, the barely perceptible ripple in his speech pattern was heard by Christine.

            “You’re saying you don’t want to squeeze every last possible minute out of tonight?” the Omega giggled, flashing her passenger a gale-hurling wink from on high. A facetious quaver playfully entered into her syllables. “All you’re doing is meeting your girlfriend’s kids. I’m sure anyone else would be completely at ease.”

            “Yeah, no biggie at all,” he laughed, stroking the ridged latticework of the Omega’s skin. “I’ve got it in the bag.”

            “I’m sure you do,” Christine said with such faith it couldn’t help but convince Nick for a few extra seconds. The road hit a curve, and her eyes fell away from her mite-sized boyfriend as she traced the slant accordingly, planting each sandaled foot with practiced grace, one in front of the other. To compensate, her fingers curled in higher above over the Beta’s head as a veritable tidal wave of muscle and flesh.

            The only impact felt by the young man, of course, was a subtle twitch beneath the skin of her palm, which he answered by stroking his hand along the living ground with a special tenderness he knew it took a kind of superhuman sensitivity to appreciate.

            Which she no-doubt possessed.

            “Just about there now,” she noted quietly, not so much for Nick’s geographical information, but more as an emotional buffer in case he wasn’t quite prepared yet.

            After all, he’d certainly laid eyes on the Omega’s coliseum of an apartment numerous times, and ridden by it on the train just for a glimpse when he felt lonely in times past. He’d even been inside a few times, when Christine was certain they’d have time alone. Its cavernous halls and sky-touching pillars never ceased to gob-smack, with furniture that could’ve constituted entire city blocks for someone of Nick’s size. Still, he was no stranger.

            Somehow, though, this trip felt different. And indeed, rightfully so.

            “Have you, um… talked to them much about… me?” Nick proffered, knowing this was probably not the time to bring this up when Christine was so nearly at home. “…us?”

            “I’ve… done my best,” the Omega said, putting on a bravely reassuring smile as she cupped her hand up closer to her chin, and suddenly the limited stars Nick could make out between the threading ropes of her brilliantly luminous hair were exchanged for the adorable, ageless features of her face filling in the void. It definitely wasn’t a bad trade.

            “You know I don’t mean… um, what I mean is…” the Beta fumbled. “If it doesn’t go… you know, great tonight, it’s not… well…”

            “Always my little pessimist, aren’t you?” Christine crooned as she finally stepped away from the road, taking an especially long stride to clear the roads as she planted the synthetic rubber sole of her footwear into the grassy plain of the Omega residential zone.

            “Maybe just a realist,” Nick said, cursing himself for being so down on the evening already, but simultaneously bracing himself for an infinite number of setbacks awaiting him inside his former teacher-turned-girlfriend’s home.

            “Mm-hmm,” the Omega murmured, her chin closing in nearer to the heel of her hand, those massive lips puckering expectantly into a pink, furrowed wall not unlike a cave opening composed of irresistibly plush flesh. “How’s this for real, then?”

            Nick’s jaw hung limp as Christine’s lips swelled toward him, accompanied by a rumbling squeak of friction from within her gurgling maw. Her mouth, as tall as his house even in their furrowed, amorous state, emanated warmth and cinnamon-scented moisture as the unfurling kiss invited him into the fold. Happily, the Beta let himself stumble forward like a trust fall directly into the plump lower lip.

            Indeed, Christine’s mouth caught him like an errant crumb, adhered to the glossed skin and bolstered ever so cautiously against the give of her palm. Nick’s feet dangled numbly off her bottom lip as the rest of his body burrowed against the wall of pillowed skin, seemingly flushing a deeper rose hue with every second he spent grappling with its folds, feverishly kissing and sucking it back, and even digging his microscopic teeth into the powerful onslaught of puckering flesh and congealed saliva.

            At last, when the Omega was satisfied with this penultimate gesture before their trek into uncharted territory, she brushed the tiny body of her lover down against her palm, setting his legs back to creased earth while her lips clenched in, allowing him to slide away.

            “T-That was… pretty real,” he gulped, wiping a hand down his moistened cheek.

            “Good,” she said, blowing him another air kiss as she marched up the final trail leading to her house. “Any time you get nervous tonight, just try to think about that.”

            “That… might not be appropriate for any time,” Nick commented, looking down to his decidedly tighter crotch area post-kiss.

            “Hmm. Maybe not,” Christine chuckled. With her free hand she extended a pinky finger tip into her occupied palm, the digit’s end easily twice as tall as her date for the evening. Rivaling the contact with her lips for surgical precision, she brushed the gridded pad of her finger along the length of Nick’s body, pausing for just a second longer over the Beta’s waist with the soft, absolute peak of her finger, and let a broad smile unfold across her lips.

            “You want your kids to see me like this?” Nick muttered gratefully, planting another kiss on the surface of his girlfriend’s fingertip as he savored the feeling of her monumental digit stroking on the increasingly insistent nub between his legs.

            He couldn’t say for sure if he’d seen the woman this utterly relaxed and even adventurous in their relationship, and when they were mere paces away from greeting her two children, to boot, though he also wasn’t one to complain, especially when she seemed so confident in tonight’s success. As long as she was happy, he supposed it wouldn’t be so terrible to try and be cheerful as well. Clearing his throat, he added: “Not that they’d probably be able to see it unless they got real damn close, but…”

            “You’re just so concerned, aren’t you?” Christine sighed, and at last let her finger drift away from his mildly aching lower regions.

            She couldn’t help but fawn just a little harder over him at this continued revelation, her already soft violet irises twinkling beneath the shadow of the porch. He’d always been on the timid side, more respectful than anyone she’d met of his age and probably of his decade, something that had drawn her to him back when their former teacher-student relationship had become one of friendship and steadily blossomed into something more some twelve months back. She’d had a feeling this would be a difficult moment for him.

            “Not if you aren’t,” Nick said simply, internally swearing to do his best to remain truthful in that vow. He stared up at the looming countenance of this gorgeous, mountainous creature who, despite her infinite power and eighty-year seniority over him, had somehow been tricked by fate into requiting his feelings for her.

            A calm settled into his skin in spite of the gnawing nerves. If anyone deserved to have a peaceful meeting of romantic and familial worlds, it was this woman, who’d been through a journey of such strife in the past four years that Nick doubted most could ever fully recover from it. He owed it to her to keep himself together and personally ingest each and every ounce of awkwardness as he met her children, both of whom were uncomfortable-cough-inducingly six and four years younger than their mother’s beau, respectively.

            “That’s the spirit,” Christine glowed. Kissing the tip of her finger, the Omega bowed the digit back down toward her infinitesimal companion and brushed the lightly dampened tip back along his body. “Keep it up and maybe you’ll get the full tour of the house later.”

            “Tour?”

            “You know… maybe kitchen, living room, closet… bedroom…” she drawled nonchalantly as she wrapped an enormous hand around the obelisk of a doorknob and gave it a twist.

            “B-Bedroom?” Nick repeated, trying not to sound too perversely optimistic.

            “I said maybe,” she reminded, though the second sultry wink she gave him indicated he wasn’t at all wrong to hope. The century-old woman brushed a knuckle along her cheek, the vibrantly hued and laugh-line-creased appearance of which suggested she wasn’t a day over thirty-two, and nudged open the front door. “Roll your eyes if you want, but I’m going to say it anyway: just be yourself. They’ll love you.”

            “Am I ever anyone else?” he joked, swallowing the last gasp of a protest as the light of the Omega’s foyer washed over him.

            “We’re here!” Christine called out, her lovely voice booming in echo through the halls of what, to her, was a modestly sized abode, but to Nick was nothing short of a geological canyon of plaster and crown molding. He’d only been in a few Omega-scaled buildings in his life, and he could still feel his breath stolen away on this particular occasion. Which wasn’t ideal, as he only had so much breath to spare, with so much of it expended on nervous energy as he watched the two people he needed to impress more than anyone else in the world stride down the hall.

            Oddly, the one he noticed first was the Alpha: Christine’s daughter Sylvia, a girl who, to hear her mother tell it, spoke in songs and regularly spilled liquid sunshine from the ends of her hair. Certainly if he’d seen her towering above him on the street, the Beta would’ve been able to recognize her as a family member to Christine, if not her genetic clone, miniaturized down to five-foot-something. Everything from the sheen of her locks to the sparkle of her skin was there, though the luster of the Omega’s violet eyes was traded for more of a silver hue. An inheritance of her father’s, Nick assumed. Eventually, though, the location she was seated on, specifically the gigantic opened hand, spread into Nick’s consciousness.

            It was only really then that the Beta took notice of Bennett, Christine’s twenty-year-old son, who, at what the Beta could only passively judge to be somewhere in the one-hundred-sixty-foot neighborhood, was by far the largest being in the room. With his angular bone structure, sun-baked tan, and a grizzled chin consumed by the intentional fuzz of a five-o’clock shadow, Bennett suggested more the son of Paul Bunyan than the son of the Beta’s dear former teacher.

            It took more than a few blinks for Nick to recognize that he was a mere flick of Christine’s fingers in distance away from the younger man, as the scope of his staggering corpus made the Omega appear more as an optical illusion. And then just a few more blinks after that were required to process that the living cliffside of the twenty-year-old’s face was contorted into the most derisively shriveling of sneers as he squinted at the speck seated in his mother’s expansive palm.

            Nick knew that look. It was a look he was much more accustomed to seeing on a considerably smaller scale, plastered on the faces of Alphas who probably wouldn’t have minded if he became ensnared in the business end of a farming thresher. Worn as it was on a face so large it might’ve fallen out of a billboard, it nevertheless was the same look.

            “Sylvie? Benny?” Christine exhaled, straightening her back as she extended the stage of her hand forward. “This is Nick.”

            “Hi, Nick,” Sylvia said with a gentle wave, seemingly having trouble looking directly at the miniature man nearly swallowed up by her mother’s giant palm creases. Her polite smile relaxed Nick sufficiently enough to put some gusto into his own emphatic wave back in a bid to be seen.

            “Hello… there… guys!” he bumbled, hating himself for the eager-beaver lucidity of his tone, and immediately smacked his lips closed to try again. “It’s good to meet you both.”

            “You too,” Sylvia responded, at last looking directly at him as she kneeled across the gangplank of her giant brother’s fingers.

            Bennett, still, said nothing. If anything, his lips seemed to thin and pale, as if they were being retracted back into his stony jawline.

            “Well… shall we?” Christine said brightly, obviously sensing the mounting tension and half-heartedly hoping they could literally outrun the social gracelessness if they kept on the move. She took a step forward in the direction of the dining room hearth beyond, nodding at her son to follow. “The table’s all set.”

            Nick, meanwhile, diverted his gaze back up to Christine as she walked, doing everything in his power to shrug off the feeling that Bennett was putting the full brunt of his house-sized brain into willing a tactical complement of missiles to bloom right out of his seething eyes and zero in on the three-inch-tall visitor.

            Maybe, the Beta considered, he had been just a little premature in declaring that he wasn’t concerned.