Writing Commission - I Don't Usually Do This

Here we have another of Sarah's unaware exploits, with a twist, as her love life takes a bit of a turn. Enjoy!

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"Don't worry, it doesn't have to be a 'thing'," Parker assured Sarah soothingly as he held the cab door open and she wobbled toward it on heels that were killing her. "We aren't even in the same department, it's not like anyone noticed us leaving together," he added with a faint chuckle.

Her cheeks burned faintly as she smiled up at him while he helped her down with a warm hand that stroked the back of hers with his thumb before he slid in beside her and gave the driver his address.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be seen or anything,” she said, laughing faintly as she brushed a blonde curl out of her eyes. “I just don’t usually-”

Still wearing that stupid smile, Parker leaned in and presesd a kiss to her mid-sentence, and she felt her heart fluttering as the subtle scent of his cologne and the brush of his stubble against her neck, the subtle rumble in his chest as he groped her thigh and held her hand. His breath on her neck sent goosebumps up her shoulders.

“Don’t bother with that,” he assured her, and she grinned as the cab pulled off.

A few minutes of moderate self-control for the driver’s sake later, the pair shuffled up the short walkway to Parker’s modest house in the suburbs, and Sarah busied her hands grasping at Parker’s shirt while he fumbled with the keys to get inside.

She hadn’t been lying, she thought to herself with burning cheeks and enjoyed the feeling of his arm around her waist. It had been months since she’d done anything like this. As a matter of fact, the last guy she’d done this with happened to share the same name. That part wasn’t intentional, she thought...hoped. It wasn’t her fault if a lot of guys her type named Parker happened to be memorable.

Even if most of those memories were disappointment when she couldn’t get in touch with them afterward. Maybe she was doomed to be haunted by one-night Parker stands. The thought almost made her snicker while he finally got the door opened and pulled her inside. Whatever, that just meant there would really be no strings attached tonight. She made a quiet promise to herself that she wouldn’t bother herself with Parker after tonight, just lean into the streak--nothing wrong with that, right?

It felt pretty right when he shut the door behind them and pinned her against it, a firm arm planted on either side of her. She wore a loose and flowy midnight-blue evening dress that left her pale shoulders bare except for the golden curls hanging tidily on them, and her wide eyes shimmered up at his as his gaze all but paralyzed her. She needed this more than she’d realized. And he had that look in his eyes men had when they were so keyed up that their minds were hazy, like their thoughts were visibly drifting back to sex. It was something that annoyed her more often than not, unless she happened to be in the mood.

Tonight, the mood was hitting hard.

She went for it. Reaching forward with a slender, exquisitely manicured hand, she gripped the lavender tie that hung from around his neck and pulled him forward. Her blood was on fire, and she didn’t care if she was forward tonight. She didn’t want him to be shy, and she planned on showing him. He gave a gasp of surprise as he came forward, but it turned into a murmur of laughter muffled by her red lipstick that covered his mouth when they met.

His hands slid up her thigh over the sheer tights, and one of them gripped her hip hungrily. Heart pounding against her chest as his hand reached up for her breast, she reached around his head to slide her fingers through his thick hair, closing her eyes and reveling in the feeling of his skin on hers.

For his part, he was in heaven. Her lips were softer and warmer than he’d been imagining all evening while they were talking at the company mixer, and he never thought a woman like Sarah would have given him the time of day much less come home with him. He wasn’t about to let the chance go to waste.

Unfortunately, Parker wasn’t aware of Sarah’s track record with men, or he might have been a little more cautious this evening.

Sarah had never looked far into the disappearances of her past flings. Her connections to them were so few and known by even fewer that it never came back to her. The reality was a strange condition that inflicted itself on the men who grew close to Sarah in situations like this. She had no control over it, no more than she had control of the horrific fates they met.

Parker felt his skin tingling.

It was more than the butterflies he had over the knockout in his arms, it was a tangible tingling that spread from his lips outward over every inch of him. He tried to ignore it and keep himself in the moment, but as he ground against Sarah, the burning didn’t just stop, but he felt a sense of vertigo. Then came the spinning, and he very suddenly felt warm, wet, and sticky.

Parker opened his eyes to see a field of red in front of him, and when he moved an arm, he realized he was caked in the substance. It was smeared all over his body, and it had a certain familiar scent to it that wracked his mind as he looked around wildly--then the world shifted. The soft surface he clung to, or rather stuck to, moved as if alive, and he felt a rush of wind around him that made him cry out in terror before he felt gravity peeling him off.

Sarah gasped, blinking as her mouth hung open, hand still up as if holding Parker close to her. She slowly drew it closer to her, looking around in utter confusion, and as she did, something fell from her lip.

Parker saw the ground under him like a distant landscape hurdling closer, and Sarah’s fingers swung under him like cranes. He was on a course for her middle finger, and he curled himself up protectively before making contact with it and bouncing off, spinning down onto her chest. He felt the now-strange sensation of the fabric writ large all around him as he rolled down her breast, but before he could find a grip or a loose thread, he found himself flung off the edge of the curve and into freefall.

The scream went silent in his mouth as he fell. She’d kicked off her shoes when they stumbled in together, and he saw her tights-clad legs span what felt like miles down to the ground to bare feet that stood like mountains. In the fall, instead of his life flashing before his eyes, he had a clear vision of what he must have looked like--a speck inexplicably falling silently down the mere span of his one-night-stand’s legs.

He braced himself for impact as he realized he was hurtling toward the top of her left foot. He didn’t know what falling to one’s death felt like, but he was as ready for it as he’d ever be.

Instead, he bounced.

His body hit the springy surface, and his diminutive frame simply toppled like a pill bug down Sarah’s foot. He felt the ridges in it as the bones within flexed, her muscles almost unconsciously shifting her weight around without the slightest clue that the dot tumbling toward the floor was her lipstick-stained companion.

He was on the floor by the time he stopped rolling, winded and petrified on his back. He gasped for air as he strained to look all the way up the vast expanse of Sarah, who was looking around in that same shocked confusion. Her voice called out, sounding like a distant echo distorted in space.

“Parker…?” Sarah called softly into the darkness. Her brain was short-circuiting as it tried to compute where he’d gone in such a short amount of time. There was nothing nearby for him to have ducked behind quickly, if this was some kind of flirty game he was playing. She wasn’t that drunk, it wasn’t like she could hallucinate making out with someone that long.

Below, Parker’s heart skipped a beat when he felt the ground rumble under him, and he looked back down to the foot that dominated the horizon of his field of vision. The nylon-clad mountain was moving...and lifting.

“You’ve...got to be kidding, this isn’t happening,” Parker murmured to himself, face paling as Sarah lifted her leg forward, slowly, cautiously. She was looking for him, he realized as his heart sank back down into his stomach. She was stepping cautiously because she thought he’d slipped further into the house or something. A sad smile flickered at his trembling face as the shadow of Sarah’s soft sole in worn nylon extended over him, the sea of wrinkled surface shifting by the second as her house-sized toes flexed passively in the course of the step. If he’d just been able to land an inch or three away, maybe….she just might have found him.

Something under Sarah’s foot made an odd snapping sound, and Sarah yelped, reflexively jerking her leg back up and pressing her back against the door. Senses on high alert, she hadn’t even been able to put her full weight on whatever she’d just stepped in before pulling back. For a frightful moment, it occurred to Sarah that she might have just stepped on a crumb, if Parker happened to have a messy house.

Then she felt it move. It was still on her sole.

Sarah’s eyes went wide. There was no way she’d just walked in on a bug, was there? She grimaced, looking down at her still-lifted foot before leaning on the door and slowly bringing it up. She held her heel in her hand as she turned her sole toward her face, and immediately, her eyes focused in on the anomaly on the otherwise familiar, smooth expanse of the bottom of her own foot.

Her mouth fell open.

It took her a solid ten seconds of staring to wrap her mind around what she was looking at. He couldn’t have been more than half an inch tall, little more than an ant’s length, but not in the shape of any bug she’d seen. No, the arms and legs attached to the torso were decidedly human-shaped. And the clothes were familiar. But that wasn’t all poor Sarah’s eyes had to contend with--those cute little human limbs of his were twisted around in various directions they shouldn’t have been...but he was still alive.

It was Parker. It was unmistakably Parker. She knew it before he even turned his head weakly up to her, that same handsome face relatively undamaged enough to make her want to smile reassuringly down at him. But no, reality was setting in, and Sarah felt her face going pale.

“Oh my god, what did I do?” Sarah breathed as realization sank in, and she put a hand to her mouth in horror as she looked down at the twisted little body.

Finally, it was her turn for her heart to skip a beat when she realized she could hear a tiny, thin voice down there wedged between the ridges of her sole, trying to talk to her. It coughed, and Sarah bit her lip.

“Okay, Parker? Can you hear me?” she said, swallowing and putting on the serious kind of face that she used when she was in go-mode at work. “I-I see you down there. I’m going to take care of this, don’t worry.”

The dot that was Parker seemed to twitch with more energy than before, and she could almost make out words as he shouted up at her. But behind the shining eyes, Sarah wasn’t quite as collected as she managed to present herself.

What on god’s green earth was she supposed to do? Peel him off, put him in a pill jar, and take him to the hospital? Possibilities began to seep into Sarah’s mind in rapid sequence. She saw herself embroiled in a years-long legal battle over the possible manslaughter of the tiny thing stuck to her foot. She’d just meant to take this guy home for one night and have a little fun for a change, just this once. But she saw her whole life unraveling before her mind’s eyes. Her career would go up in flames.  Once this got to the news, she’d be the woman who crushed someone nearly to death underfoot in the most bizarre of circumstances. She barely knew this guy, this thing less than an ant under her, and she could see her entire identity getting shaped around him for the foreseeable future.

She swallowed hard, staring down at him with an unreadable expression. It flickered through her mind that this might not have been the first time this happened. How many other men had stood her up seemingly out of thin air over the years?

...none of those had ever come back to haunt her. How could they? There was no evidence. Oh thank god, there was no evidence! And that meant…maybe this problem too could just...kinda...go away.

Parker’s twitching had gotten slower the longer Sarah stared at him.

She took a slow breath and composed herself. “I’m sorry,” she whispered softly. “I don’t usually do this kind of thing.”

Sarah cast a final look around the room, assuming a confused expression once more as if she was still looking for Parker...as she slowly lowered her foot back into her shoe. “I guess no one’s here,” she said out loud, as much to herself as to the lack of witnesses around them as she felt his tiny body struggling in a panic against her sole. It tickled her softly as she slid it into her shoe, feeling the insole brush against the ball of her foot before she put her full weight down onto it and stood back up.

There was a soft crunch in her foot as she picked up the other shoe to put on, and the tickling stopped.

Sarah’s heart raced a mile a minute as she finished putting her shoes on, and she brushed herself off, running her finger along her lips to clean off any messed-up lipstick. Flustered, she buttoned her shirt, smoothed her clothes out, and used the sleeve of her shirt to open and wipe down the doorhandle.

Her shoes clacked against the concrete sidewalk as she walked, eyes locked ahead, wide. She barely heard her own voice as she called a cab a few blocks down. It wasn’t just in shock over the deed she’d just covered up. It was the fact that the butterflies in her stomach hadn’t gone away when she disposed of Parker.

On the contrary, she realized as she settled into the back of a cab for the second time tonight, they’d gotten stronger.