Aborigen

The next two weeks went like that: Layton’s open-handed invitation by his little door, the quiet footsteps over the shelf between her fingers, and sometimes he’d come out in tiny shorts or a shred of rag wrapped around his waist. And then nothing. The tiny man sidled out from behind the white plastic door, his hands modestly cupping his crotch, but then he curled up in her palm like he belonged there.

That’s where they stayed, too. She posted sentry outside his little home, and her hand never left the bookshelf. Layton herself wasn’t sure why she didn’t bring him down to her chest, showing off her breasts to someone of that size, tucking him into her warmth. But she didn’t, she simply stood there resting her arm on the shelf, with her tiny little friend forming a curlicue in her palm where the creases formed a 7. That was supposed to be lucky, or something. Someone who didn’t know better told her that, and so she didn’t know better.

Layton whispered to him on these nights. She would lean against the bookshelf, the unwanted psychology and women’s studies textbooks propped near her bicep, and she would tell him about her day. Of course he understood her, he’d made that clear the first moment they met, but he never spoke up. Sometimes he sat up, bare-chested in blue jeans, staring up at her as though her face were a meteor shower he couldn’t stop studying. His fine little body stretched back as he rested his hands behind him—and, fuck her, she couldn’t feel a thing—while he witnessed her spectacle. She babbled about where she worked, the tedious dynamics of six or seven people stuck together in a small office in what should’ve been a failing business, but it just clutched at each month desperately, slowly making its way down the calendar. “The artificial wood paneling,” she said, laughing to herself. “No one makes that anymore. They can’t, it’s so ugly. But you know what that means, then? That means that tacky little shack is older than me, probably older than my dad. It just won’t fall down, nobody’ll pack it in.”

Of course he understood her, he just never responded. He stared up at her, and his features were too small to know for sure, but she had the strong suspicion he was staring at her lips when she talked. Sometimes she’d just feel a little press of heat on them, and she’d stammer over her words or forget what she was saying. The little man never reacted, never smirked, never changed his expression. He only stared up at her, giving her his full attention.

But even on the other nights, when he was naked or scantily clad, curled up and resting his cheek and his palm upon the soft grooves of her skin, she knew he was listening. Even with his eyes closed, even when she couldn’t see him breathe, she just knew. She just knew.

This holding pattern couldn’t last forever. There was one night when he climbed into Layton’s hand, wearing nothing, and he didn’t curl up and doze while listening to her. No. He sat up and stared at her as though he’d forgotten his own routine. She could see his teeny-tiny little junk between his folded legs, but he just stared up at her bold as brass. Guileless.

Her thumb twitched. It could almost have been a muscle spasm, but it was too deliberate. Acting on its own, her thumb curled and bent and the pad of it rested on the outside of his thigh, before sliding toward his inner thigh. There it rested for two hot seconds before she lifted it away. He had stared at her thumb, almost half the size of his own body, and then he looked back up at her. He didn’t retreat, he didn’t cry out, he didn’t even flinch.

He went perfectly still. She rested her thumbprint on the soft, hot flesh of his inner thigh, a relatively long leg aside from his scale, and he simply watched it rest there. If anything, she could feel his breath change. It was impossible, of course, a hot little gust of surprise couldn’t register on the knuckle of her thumb. Maybe she saw his ribs settle for a second, but it was closer to something she felt in her skin. A brief, weak electrical impulse sparked by her thumb on his leg, ceasing when she lifted her digit away. There he sat, just like always, in the middle of her hand.

Her heart was pounding, and she wondered if he could feel it. She licked her lips, slightly chapped, and she bit a small flake of skin off the left swell of her bottom lip. It tugged free and, not knowing what else to do, she let it drift toward her throat.

“I know what I want,” Layton said. She spoke abruptly, almost surprising herself. Her breath flowed down to him, like a ripple across the heads of wheat.

“But I’m not going to take it. You have to ask.”

And there it sat. He didn’t move in her palm, only sat there like usual. Her fingers didn’t curl down to grasp him and jam him where, oh fuck, she wanted him so badly. None of that. She sat there, her forearm and hand as motionless as the previous two weeks, and the air between them vibrated with the pulse around heavy machinery.

Something important had changed. Layton wasn’t sure whether she’d blown it, but she did nothing wrong, she felt. She let him know what she was thinking—God, how couldn’t he know?—and she just left it there. He was in charge, the tiny man. She knew, they knew that she could do whatever she wanted with him, but she wouldn’t. It was out there now, like a large, unmarked box on the front stoop on a Sunday afternoon. The tip of her tongue found another flake of lip and she worried at it until it drew a sharp pain and she tasted copper. Licking her lips, she instead regaled him with some drama around agriculture and politics that she’d heard at work. She hadn’t really paid attention but knew enough to share with him until it was time for him to slip out of her hand and tuck himself into the bed she’d made him.

He hadn’t said a word. Nothing in his expression, as far as she could tell, suggested that she’d ruined anything, and the night ended like every other night. But still.

It was the next night that she got her answer.

Layton wiped a little toothpaste foam from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist, and tonight’s nightgown was particularly gauzy and threadbare, so soft it almost had no feeling. She walked up to the bookcase, and he was there, standing there by the white plastic door that stuck.

Out there, outside the house. Waiting for her. Staring at her long before her gaze picked him out. The reach of the lamp on her nightstand cast him in warm amber, his bare chest and his miniature jeans and his bare feet with truly minuscule toes. Funny, the things we notice in moments like this, she thought. When she held her hand out, it was trembling. Her hand was shaking very slight to the time of her heart. She tried so hard to straighten out her fingers and hold them still, but he didn’t seem to care, just hopped into her palm like nobody’s business. This time, however, he didn’t sit down. He didn’t plant his butt on the upper line of her 7 and fold his scrawny legs in a little triangle, leaning back to get ready for the avalanche of her words.

This time he knelt in her palm, glancing up at her for one second before his thin upper body arched down. She couldn’t feel the press of his forehead upon her skin, but she thought his hair was a little itchy, if she weren’t making things up in her head. He was shaking, too. His palms, flat against her waxy, soft flesh, did a poor job of bracing his body. She could see the finest lines of shadow form on his sides as he breathed too hard, too fast.

Layton stared at him, the little bowed man in her hand. What did this mean? She knew what it meant. What if she was wrong? She probably wasn’t. It was new, that’s all, just something new. So what should she do?

She ignored the burning sensation between her thighs. That is, she couldn’t ignore it, but she wouldn’t act on it. As carefully as she could, with her trembling hand and all, she lifted the tiny man up past the frills over her chest, past her bare neck where her carotid throbbed without a shred of self-respect, and up to her face.

He looked up. He pressed his head down into her palm.

Her thumb nudged awkwardly at him. Her chewed nail wedged under his shoulder and slowly unfolded him until he was sitting up and looking at her. More out-of-focus, this time, and her eyes tugged as they strained to cross and look at him. She couldn’t begin to imagine what she must look like to him, at this point.

But she got him to sit up, and as if he understood what was happening, he leaned back on his hands. Still kneeling, but baring his chest to her. Warm air gusted from her nostrils, setting his dark hair flowing back for a moment, and then she lost all sight of him as she drew him in and pressed her puckered lips to his pecs, his ribs, his little abs. Fuck, her chapped lips … it was probably okay. She just wouldn’t scrape her lips over him. No, she pulsed, she pushed her kiss into his little body. She felt him, the silk-fine skin, that astounding flame of warmth he seemed to endlessly produce. Layton stayed there way too long, but when she pulled back, something snagged her lip.

The tiny man’s fingers gripped the ridge of her upper lip, aside her philtrum. One tugged at the thin, glassy hairs on her lip, then reached out to grab some wrinkles of her upper lip and pull her closer, as if he could haul a huge head like hers around. But she continued kissing him, just one slow pulse after another, and his clutches turned to soft caresses of deep yearning. Should have been ticklish, with all the micronerves packed into the upper lip, but it was only sweet and tender.

Her lips parted slightly. Hot, moist air rolled out of her oral cavern and pooled around him. She couldn’t see it, but one brave arm reached between her lips and ran his palm over her lower incisor.

Her tongue, glistening in the lamplight, thickened and rose and moved so slowly to press into his chest. His hands had to touch that, too, and this she could easily feel. He caressed her tongue, petting it like a Bengal tiger or maybe an orca, whichever was more apt. Her tongue retreated and she ducked in for a quick kiss on his face, her thick lips wrapping around his head just for half a second. Desire, but also a promise. As much as one could tease in a situation like this.

She had misjudged his actions slightly, when she pulled back to view him. Not by much, just some details that were corrected when her eyes could focus again. The little man’s head was thrown back, his mouth a dark oval of rapture, eyes closed, and his chest rose and fall like a dormouse’s. Her saliva glistened on his throat and collarbones.

Layton only watched him, now. They’d attempted quite a lot tonight. They’d done more in one evening than in the previous weeks. The waiting, the agony of waiting was killing her, and it’s a good thing he had no idea what she was doing with carrots in the other parts of the house, a couple times a week. Good thing her father never learned that, too. Now, though, she was tormenting herself with the room she gave him. His own house that she never invaded. Staying up with him all night, letting him rest in her hand while she blathered about whatever mindless bullshit. All this, while an  inferno raged deep inside her, and how it hadn’t consumed her was beyond her understanding. Perhaps it was a measure of how badly she wanted this, the quiet moments, the slow burn of trust. Him, trusting her; her, trusting this was going somewhere.

She never spoke, only held him in the open space before her bookcase, before her face. Her pinky twitched with the awkward turn of her wrist but that was it. She studied the tiny man as his head lowered and he visibly struggled to catch his breath. His eyes shot into her mouth, slid up her nose, then picked out her left iris. His full face, turned toward only one of her eyes, that’s how small he was compared to her. Moments like this really drove that home.

She waited. She ached and hungered and waited. He did catch his breath, and he straightened up, and in the silence of her room with no planes overhead and no TVs elsewhere in the house, she could hear him speak. His throat was dry, and it came out a little more than a whisper, but she heard it.

“I want,” he croaked, “to stay. Tonight.”

Of course he could stay. He had a house, he had a shelf. Where was she going to send him?

She was too pleased to smile. That wasn’t what he meant, and as another person whose worlds failed her in the clutch, she knew it. She was far too pleased to crack a smile.

Her bare feet turned on the plush carpet, stepped over the extension cord her lamp was plugged into, and carefully planted one rounded, shiny knee into the blankets of her bed. She reached over, her breasts hanging within the threadbare nightgown, and rested the back of her hand on the pillow beside the pillow she used. There, that’s where he would be … tonight. Glancing up at her, the tiny man scootched on his butt to the edge of her hand, then let himself tumble into the sweet linen pillow. He spread himself out immediately, just as she did the first time her family visited a nice hotel. Perhaps all humans were coded for this, whenever they got the opportunity.

Carefully, Layton turned, tugged up the sheets, and let her hips sink into the mattress before hoisting her legs up and sliding them into bed. God, everything on her looked huge when he was around. And she wasn’t a big girl, no, but she felt like it. Her feet slid so far away from her under the sheets before she carefully, slowly lowered her body into the mattress. She lay there for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, almost afraid to breathe. The moment was too perfect. Things were coming along, just as she’d hoped.

She turned her head and there he was, a smear of peach and blue in the center of her huge fluffy-cloud pillow. He was looking at her too. They looked at each other and she wasn’t sure whether she was smiling.

Then she smiled, and he smiled. She was pretty sure he smiled. It was hard to tell. She reached out slowly with one arm, letting her hand and fingers hover over him for a second, and when he didn’t scramble away shrieking, she simply let the tips of three fingers run lightly over the fine contours of his little body. He closed his eyes, he may have purred. His hips definitely nudged into her middle finger, when it passed. Another stroke would’ve been fine, she wanted it—she wanted much more than that—but here she’d let it lay. Memorizing his pose for a second longer, she turned away and clicked the lamp off, and they lay in the darkness together. She, in bed with another man. She, the giantess, with the sexy little field-mouse of a man beside her, stretched out on her pillow like a mountain climber baring himself before God.

The words came easily, naturally, as though someone else had written and delivered them. Because none of the bravado was hers, she didn’t know where the sentiment had come from, except she did. In the darkness Layton whispered:

“I’m going to watch you fall apart. One night at a time. And when you’re ready to beg … I’ll be here.”

The night was extra-dark and extra-still, then. How on earth was she supposed to sleep now.