Dinner for One (Chapter 3)

After eying the slicked-on toejam blobs crammed betwixt Bri’s digits that looked the easiest to grab without causing a disturbance, creating the same tension as in a game of Jenga only with dramatically higher and more-humiliating stakes, Cody again stared up the oblivious titaness’s towering bare legs, just making sure her attention was still focused exclusively on her homework. Her head was bobbing to the music, and though it was tough to see anything she was actually doing on the desk, the shrinker could hear her occasionally grumbling in annoyance over her assignments and tapping on her phone screen out of distraction. Once the song changed again, too, her feet adopted a slower pat-a-caking pattern with the carpet, which meant her toes weren’t bouncing as violently, and Cody knew he might not get a better chance than this. Timing his theft right when those chubby-bulbed toes were raised and splayed out to their widest webbed extreme such that the tender curve of probably-ticklish flesh housing those jammy treats was most visible, the little guy lunged and scooped out what he needed before her piggies could unknowingly scrunch together again and pinch his arm numb.

            The taste wasn’t any pleasanter than usual as Cody immediately force-fed the grubby creepily-sticky wads of Bri’s toe gunk down his throat, and maybe it was even worse than usual since he’d had a near-starved day’s respite away from such repulsive flavors festering on his tongue. Nevertheless, there was no delaying here, not with his gut howling for food, and he’d need the stamina if he was going to get out of this room without being found, let alone without putting himself in danger of being crushed by this blissfully unaware adolescent giantess’s foot. The sediment’s texture too was especially difficult to muscle past, gooier and residue-soaked as a morphed-together hybrid of stagnant perspiration, dead skin, and liquefied insole terrain. It required more chewing to get through these hellishly sour nubs than the fluffier easily-slurped sockjam balls that Cody had often been able to steal from Ashley’s shoes and choke down before his taste buds could suffer too badly. This mushy difficulty instead almost reminded him of peanut butter or melted gouda, though the smelly brine-dense acridness of Bri’s sock-free foot smut made it impossible to even think of such “real” foods that could no longer serve Cody after Kayla’s thoughtless cruelty.

Shivering in revulsion the whole time, and desiring to spit it all back up even while doing so might leave him in a hunger coma in a spot he could so easily be trampled dead, the shrinker ate up everything he’d grabbed. It was a start, and at least made his stomach shut up, but he was far from sated after so many hours between rations. After catching his breath and overriding the nausea from Bri’s tart gullet-tacky toejam, Cody again waited for another slow song to play so the giantess’s foot-tapping would settle, and then he feebly struck again. Three more times, the two-incher repeated this process, gorging himself on decreasing quantities of soggy intra-toe crumbs, until he was pretty sure he’d gathered everything he could while incognito. It was a miracle that Bri hadn’t already been alerted to the tiny desperate hands picking half-hardened sweat glop of the pinkish puffiness of her toe crevices. And though Cody had hoped this gross bounty would be enough, his insides still ached for more after such a lengthy drought.

Luckily (or maybe just the opposite of that), the youthful giantess had begun to involve the full length of her bare peds into the tempo of her playlist, lifting her tired squashily-wrinkled soles off the ground whenever the bass dropped in her earbuds and then pounding them down with a spirited thud. When a naïve Bri seemed to tire of this passive activity, she eventually propped her heels against the wheels of her chair, finally leaving her naked arches at an accessible slant. Trying to move slowly back into the shadows so his sudden micro-movements wouldn’t be noticed in her peripherals, Cody crept timidly beneath the pale meaty overhang of the behemoth schoolgirl’s resting sole.

As he’d both hoped and feared he’d discover, there was a much-richer buffet of gluey gray footjam flecks spackling the deeper dimples at the cushy center of her bent sole crescent here. Though Cody would’ve liked nothing more than to hesitate for a while longer, since the idea of crouching below the droppable heft of an entire humongous foot was considerably more dangerous than possibly getting an arm pinched between toes, he heard Bri muttering note-taking reminders to herself under her breath, and could see her heel rocking subtly against the wheel in a way that suggested it could lurch forward again at any second and seal away his chances. So he took a deep breath, both for courage and because the humid atmosphere directly below her spongy school-wearied nude sole was especially musky, and cautiously snatched away as many dangled goop-strands from her petite and mighty ped as he could carry. With these nasty prizes in tow, Cody dove back out to the relative-safety below Bri’s legs, and once again quickly scarfed through a punishing array of marshy salt-putrefied insole mess chunks so freshly peeled off the girl’s damp underfoot flesh like rotten fruit from a grove.

“Fucking Kayla…” Cody inaudibly scowled to himself, thinking only of her smug face throughout every harrowing swallow of the unknowing giantess’s viscous sole corruption. Though time was precious here, the shrinker had to take a full five minutes of breathlessly waiting beneath Bri before he could even attempt another “food” run, making sure his system didn’t revolt and upchuck all the funky toejam clumps he’d fought so hard to acquire and survive. His eyes wouldn’t stop watering and his cheeks stung like he’d just sucked the juice from a whole lime, but Cody knew he was almost in the clear. One more hateful main course of filched toejam would do the trick, and then he could get the hell out of here.

Naturally, his fortune being what it was, Cody somehow couldn’t even feel surprised when, just as he was about to venture under Bri’s opposite foot for probably-easier pickings of grit-festered foot-jelly, the giantess dipped her heel off the chair wheel and accidentally brushed the brawny shoe-swollen curvature of her outer sole directly against the unseen little invader. For the first bracing instant afterward, the two-incher thought he might’ve been conked out cold, and his brain was dazily trying to catch up. Then he noticed the foreboding flinch in her statuesque body, and managed to roll clear just as both of Bri’s bare peds launched forward and slammed concussively into the floor in a way that might well have stomped him to pulp if he hadn’t dodged. But Cody certainly wasn’t out of the woods yet.

In a flustered rush, the giantess rolled her chair far away from the desk, inquisitively gasping in pre-emptive disgust of whatever insect she likely expected to find crawling on her skin. Though the sickened shrinker was still hunkered now in a spot where the girl’s leg might block her immediate view to him, as she leaned toward the floor with a nose-wrinkled frown on her pretty leviathan face to search the floor, it would only be a matter of breaths before her squinted gaze caught sight of him. And once that happened, Cody didn’t know whether he’d be better off being mistaken as a spider while she tried more-successfully to crush him under her heel, or instead being recognized (the more likely outcome) and having to explain why he was spying on her from below at two inches tall with incriminating toejam-smears painted on his face like sauce from a baby back rib binge. With no other escape plan, he followed panicky instinct and activated his wrist-worn device. He’d chosen to shrink so quickly, Cody wasn’t even certain what size he’d set to make himself, until he was left sprawling at a far-more miniscule stature before the epic globe of an oily-shimmering toeprint. To his partial relief, Bri’s discerning sightline seemed to pass invisibly over him, proving that he’d shrunken far enough to vaguely blend in with the carpet at a first glance. But considering he’d never been this small before, when the slightest budge from the giantess’s foot created a breeze that could knock him clean over, Cody still felt very far from safe.

Even while a logical voice in the back of his head shouted at him to get the hell out of here while he was still undiscovered and mostly-unharmed, though, it was nigh-impossible not to just stand and gawk for a moment in pure shell-shocked awe of Bri’s new comparatively-mountainous scale above him, in the same way that an unexpectedly breathtaking landscape view would’ve forced him to take pause. And, truly, the girl was her own living landscape after Cody’s latest shrinkage. The scope of just her island-esque bare feet alone was beyond words, let alone the whole rest of her, stretching toward what felt now like the sky, but was in fact still only her bedroom ceiling.