Past the string curtain there was another room with a huge billiards table lit by some pendant lights hanging down from the ceiling, while the corners of the room were kept in shadow. It wasn’t just a huge table from my perspective; it must have been about 12 feet. A few people stood around while the balls were set out, while Samantha put me down on the polished wooden surface of a bar counter to the side of the room, while other people sat in the stools to watch.

“REFEREE FOR US, SMALL FRY,” one of the guys called out to me.

“Damn,” I muttered, more to myself, “I love pool.” What a kick in the guts. I would never be able to play again. Not at my size.

However, the others heard me; the music wasn’t as clear in this room.

“WELL, HEY NOW,” said Samantha’s male friend, “WE CAN’T HAVE THE LITTLE FELLA SIT OUT IF HE DOESN’T WANT TO…AND,” he pulled something out and held it in the air for everyone to see, “LOOKIE HERE—”

It appeared to be a transparent cue ball, but a little bigger than a standard cue ball. With us all watching, he gave it a twist, unscrewing it into two halves.

Before I was able to register what was happening, he snapped me up off the bar. Next second my butt plopped down inside the shell of one of the halves of the cue, before the other half whipped over my head and was screwed on tight. Now I could see there were a couple of tiny holes in one half of the ball, letting air through.

“This is not what I meant!” I cried, slapping my palms against the inside of the ball. “Get me out of here!”

The group just tittered and exchanged glances.

Then the green table rose up under the bottom of the ball as it was placed in its starting position, facing the triangle rack.

Samantha voiced no objections to this set-up; she even took up a cue stick herself, as did several other ladies, some of them looking a little tipsier than others.

“IT’S YOUR MAN PLAYING BALL, SAM,” her bearded male friend said, “SO HOW ABOUT YOU BREAK?”

Without saying a word, Samantha leaned over the table to take the first shot, curving her posterior over the rail – surely a glorious vision that everyone except myself could behold – and her boobs pressing against the emerald baize, while she lined the nub of the stick up with the cue ball – or not the ball itself but, it seemed, my face; and the way her eyes were unblinkingly trained on mine made me swear she was mentally placing a crosshair right on my forehead…

“IT’S A SLIGHTLY BIGGER BALL,” someone suggested, “SO YOU NEED TO HIT IT HARDER THAN USUAL.”

Swallowing hard, my back suddenly clapped against the inside of the ball furthest away from her, accidentally getting the ball to roll a little.

“HEY, NO CHEATING, SAM,” one of the guys hollered, “TELL THE BALL NOT TO WALK ACROSS THE TABLE.”

Her aim relaxed long enough for her to tut me.

“JERRY, PLEASE! THIS IS NOT GOING TO HURT YOU ONE BIT...”

She slid forward into her aim again, starting to draw the cue back…

Watching that focused cue nub was like trying to engage in a blinking competition with someone aiming a rifle at your face. The waiting was the worst part; knowing at any moment it was about to slam into me. But I didn’t dare shut my eyes and risk looking like a complete baby in front of everyone, not when they’d only just met me.

“CHECK OUT THAT RACK!” one of the guys jeered. He was holding the wooden triangle rack. Some people laughed.

Samantha didn’t break her focus, but her eyes narrowed.

Check out that rack? I marvelled at the pun. Pure gold. Why hadn’t I thought of –

BANG

The stick punched the ball, my feet upended, and there was madness.

The lights were whizzing around and around and around as I spun so fast I couldn’t distinguish up from down. My face slammed into a wall, then I was flipped around and dropped onto my back, then my face slammed into a wall again, and over and over…

The ball jolted into the starting balls, causing them to explode away. Meanwhile, the cue ball lost half of its speed, jarring me into the inner wall one last time, before I slid and tumbled around on the bottom of the ball as it meandered off to one side.

I had a scant few seconds to collect myself before someone else stepped up for their shot, then I was sent into another clattering tornado of bright lights, bright balls, green felt and approving laughter.

“YOU’RE ON A ROLL, JERRY!” one of the girls joked.

“HE’S GOT MORE TORQUE THAN MY SUBURU WRX!” a guy said.

The game moved on, shot after shot. They weren’t playing a standard two person game; everyone in the little group was having a go.

Whenever it was a girl’s turn, she leaned over the table, inadvertently presenting her cleavage to me. Unfortunately, this always preceded a violent encounter with the cue, and I began to dread the sight of boobs. Maybe they noticed my alarm, as some of the girls wiggled their eyebrows at me or puckered their lips, trying to get a reaction from me as they aimed, until the guys started telling them to hurry up and take their shot.

To her credit, Samantha never did anything like that. When it was her turn, she just stared me down like I was an animal she was about to pounce on. With a face that cool, she should have been playing poker.

As the game wore on, the laughter at my expense dwindled, the jokes about me shifted into casual conversation, as my presence in the ball became normal. This was even worse than the jokes because it was like I had turned invisible. Even Samantha didn’t look at me anymore. When she wasn’t taking her turn, she sat on a bar stool to the side, drinking from a tumbler and talking quietly with another girl.

Eventually I lost track of her and everyone else as my world shrank to the inside of the hot, cramped cue ball. My breath was fogging up the inside of the ball, and sweat rolled down my brow. My mouth was watering copiously as I fought wave after wave of nausea. It was lucky I was not playing referee anymore as I had forgotten the score long ago.

Because most people were drunk, it took a lot of false hits for balls to get potted, dragging the game on unreasonably. In fact, the game never did technically end; someone accidentally hit a pendant light with the tip of a cue, causing it to fall and smash on the table.

“OH, NICE!” someone said sarcastically.

This signalled the end of the game.

An enormous hand overshadowed me, the fingers pressing around the outside of the cue ball, lifting it off the table. A male face – one of the guys who’d been playing – peered in at me casually and then I found myself zooming up towards the ceiling as he spun the ball up into the air and caught it again a couple of times with one hand.

I tapped on the inside ball and made some noises of frustration. Without reaction, he unscrewed the ball and gently tipped me out onto the bar counter.

There was an empty tumbler where Samantha had been sitting. She seemed to have disappeared. People kept shuffling in and out of the room, constantly changing the sea of looming faces, and many of these didn’t even look down to see me.

There was a girl sitting on one of the stools, leaning back with her arm draped over the counter and watching another group of people start setting up another game of pool. I strode over the table towards her.

“Excuse me,” I began. “There was a girl in here,” I began, “her name’s Samantha; black dress and—”

“SAMANTHA FREDDI,” the woman said mechanically.

I just stared, embarrassed. I knew Samantha had been conceived in the Apennines while her parents had been travelling and yet I didn’t know her surname. And she was supposed to be my girlfriend. Oh well, there were bigger things to worry about.

The girl gave me a look.

“OH BABE, YOU DON’T KNOW…” Her words slurred a little and her breath was alcoholic.

“What?”

“SOME GUY, LIKE, TRIED TO GROPE HER OR SOMETHING AND SHE’S HAVING A LITTLE COOLING OFF SESH UPSTAIRS. I WOULDN’T BOTHER HER JUST FOR NOW. HAVE A DRINK.” She smiled and tilted her cup towards my face. The opposite side had a big lipstick mark on the rim.

Too tired to care what the drink was, I leaned over and swallowed what tasted like mixed vodka. The I said:

“She should have told me where she was.”

The woman shrugged, disinterested.

“SAM IS A LONE WOLF, OR…” her brow furrowed, “…WHAT IS A FEMALE WOLF CALLED?” Her eye brow raised hesitantly, “…A BITCH?”

“Hey!” I said sharply. “I believe the correct term is ‘she-wolf.’”

“OH JERRY, YOU ARE SUCH A CARD,” she tittered as if I’d told a funny joke. “YOU’VE GOT TO COME AND MEET MY FRIENDS—”

— And she swept me up in her hands and took me out of the room. The other rooms of the house flashed past me as she bounded around looking for her friends. Meanwhile, I cast glances around in case Samantha had come downstairs, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then again, the dim yellow light from the glowing lampshades didn’t help identify people’s faces.

We passed a living room with exposed brick walls that had been cleared out and had laser lights shooting out overhead. By the looks of it, these were not for dancing, but to give the people who’d taken acid something to do.

Jennifer would hate it here, I thought randomly: no color; no dancing for fun; no traditional party games. The snack offerings were a little thin, too. Everyone had a bottle in their hands but no one was eating.

She would hate that. She thought about food every seven seconds.

For the next couple of hours, I was passed from one pair of hands to the next, sometimes almost immediately, and sometimes I was kept with people for fifteen or twenty minutes, or at least until they wandered off absent-mindedly, or I was snatched from them by someone else impatient to have their ‘turn’ with me.

At one point I was grabbed up by a young woman and excitedly taken to show her boyfriend. The two of them found an irresistible photo opportunity in holding me up in front of the woman’s phone camera, whilst the pair leaned in on either side of me and each simultaneously planting a kiss on my cheeks, one of them on my left and the other on my right. As they jostled and struggled to get the angle and lighting right, I found my head almost entirely buried between their big puckered lips, and their combined alcoholic breath was almost enough to knock me out.

But it was difficult to be irritated at people when they grinned and admired me, and acted like I was a small scale celebrity. I rode on shoulders and heads like a venerated sultan gliding around on a wooden litter chair carried on the backs of slaves.

Natalie was right: this was the first time I was properly, freely interacting with people, with no supervising full size person right there to protect me, and it was exhilarating and affirming. I’d never been treated like this at any party I’d been to at full size. At normal size, I’d been next to a nobody at parties, noticed only for the wrong reasons. Was this so bad? No; it wasn’t so bad at all. In fact, it was a salve to my injured self-esteem. This was the most belonging I’d felt since being this size.

Every so often guys came up to me and launched into asking me about me my workout regime, trying to score tips and strategies, as if my advice would be just as relevant to them, regardless of size. They must have seen the TV program; seen me buck naked and flexing my muscles and climbing all over everything. I tried to explain that my shrunken physique was different: a freak of nature, but it didn’t seem to matter what I said; half the time they were more interested in bragging about their programs. They wrenched their sleeves back and pumped their biceps at me like they were trying to compete with me; like I was a worthy competitor.

— A little drunker, I looked down to find my jacket and turtleneck were suddenly missing, so I started posturing, sprinting laps up and down a table while roaring like an animal, punching my fists into some guy’s bicep like it was a punching bag, and then trying to do acrobatics and flips along a table while some random people clapped in time.

— Suddenly I was swimming around inside a punch bowl with no memory of how I got inside, as a flock of young women played a game of trying to push my head under with the underside of the ladle.

Because, for all the men who came up to me, many, many more women were keen to be seen talking to me, and for very different reasons than the men. When I got their attention and spoke to them – particularly if I started with a ‘Hey beautiful’ or ‘Hey gorgeous’ – they tended to curl their hair around their fingers and blush.

Boyfriends playfully slipped me into their girlfriends’ cleavage, and their girlfriends – by intoxication or their sheer refusal to offend me – giggled bashfully as if this was an honor. A couple of these girls bounced up and down on the balls of their feet as my feet accidentally tickled the space between their boobs, which only jostled me further down into their chests.

Some of the girls –exceedingly attractive girls– found any and every trivial excuse to lean in and swiftly kiss me on the cheek. It would always begin with me, all of a sudden, finding one of these girls locking eyes with me in an almost predatory way, and I knew – just knew – she was waiting patiently and intently for a lull in the conversation, whereon she would smack me with a wet one.

If I complimented a woman, I was rewarded with a kiss.

If I said something funny, I was rewarded with a kiss.

If I did a stupid little dance, I was rewarded with a kiss.

Sometimes I found myself at the end of a big pair of glossy, puckered lips for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Many of these were directed at my cheeks, but a few bold ones ‘accidentally’ got my lips.

After flexing my torso at the request of a woman who wanted to see my figure, I suddenly found my pecs and abs getting lavished by the wet suction of a different girl’s unbridled appetite for my bare muscled flesh. Always friends clamored to snap photos of these unsolicited acts of affection on their phones – usually the kissers themselves requested the photos, as if as bragging rights.

Girls also delighted in feeding me little things from the snack tables (few as there were), sometimes impaled on toothpicks for me to bite off in pieces, but more often than not, this feeding was a ruse for physical contact, and the girls dispensed with the toothpicks and just fed me straight from their hands – or even from between their teeth. Some of the women goaded me to crawl into their hands to get a food object. Others liked to dangle the food above my head and ask me for a kiss, first, whereon I would be rewarded with the snack. Playing along, I would pretend to argue, and then give in, and they would delightedly expose their cheek for me. I would step forward to press a quick kiss to their cheek, when they would flick their heads around, catch my face against their lips before I could react. My drink-impaired reflexes made me fall for this ploy a lot.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say the women couldn’t keep their hands off me. Long, shining feminine fingernails encircled me, grazed my chest, swept over my stomach, squeezed my biceps, and ruffled my hair. I was being passed through more hands than a dollar bill.

Amazing and a little scary how quickly I got used to the feeling of having a butt cheek pinched, just by it happening so often. It was clear when a woman was considering getting ‘handsy’ because she would bite her lip in this particular way as she looked at me; that one signal opened up a gateway to all kinds of tactile hijinks. Another ‘tell’ was when a woman knelt down in front of me, as I stood on a table, bringing her face level with me. It was not only a silent request to get closer, but a strategy to block out my view of other girls and focus purely on her.

I found this slightly patronizing at first, though I told myself they didn’t mean to belittle me. However, some women went further; leaning over me in an almost possessive way, maybe sweeping an arm in front of my path sometimes accompanied with a ‘Not so fast’ or ‘Where do you think you’re going...?’. These too were ‘tells’ for a desire for physical affection.

And it got even bolder as the night wore on.

I was lowered onto the protruding butts of drunk women who had bent over, or leaned over tables, and dared to rodeo as the women sashayed their hips and shook their butts to the pounding music. Most of the women were wearing dresses, but one woman who agreed to play the ‘bull’ had put on some yoga pants, and I made the misjudgment of digging into her waistband to hang on as she twerked to the music like her life was at stake. During a relentless bass beat, the whiplash from the crazy torque of her hips somersaulted me into a head-plant straight down her crack. And because her crack was slicked with sweat from her exertions, I slid in deep. Everyone found this hilarious, including the girl, although I couldn’t laugh because my cheeks were so tightly packed between her cheeks.

Later, surrounded by a crowd of young – very drunk – women, all friends, I loosely remarked on the physical beauty of one when she caught my eye and brazenly thumbed my bulge before I had even registered what she was doing. To my dazed confusion, I realized I wasn’t wearing any pants anymore, and had no memory of what had happened to them. My briefs felt very hot and tight.

The girl’s friends all tittered and gasped with mock scandal. But many were also eyeing the girl with something like admiration, as if only they could enjoy the same courage.

“NOT BAD,” the girl grinned smugly, looking around at her friends. “I MEAN, ALL THINGS TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION…”

“CHLOE!” one of the other girls , “YOU ARE SO BAD!”

“OH, DON’T BE A PRUDE. HE LOVED IT.”

“ONLY PROBLEM IS, SEX IS IMPOSSIBLE,” one of the girls pointed out, with absolutely no pretense.

“WALKING THROUGH WALLS IS IMPOSSIBLE,” Chloe rolled her eyes. “VAGINAL PENETRATION IS OUT. BUT CLITORAL STIMULATION IS STILL IN. AND IT COULD BE EVEN BETTER, BECAUSE HE’S SMALLER AND MORE DELICATE, MORE PRECISE. YOU COULD HOLD HIM IN ONE HAND AND DIRECT HIM THE WHOLE WAY—” she was even making explicit hand gestures now, to demonstrate, “—LIKE A LITTLE INSTRUMENT THAT WAS MADE TO TALK DIRECTLY TO YOUR CLIT.”

“WHO SAYS VAGINAL PENETRATION IS OUT…?” one of the other girls piped up with a nymphish smirk.

This frank discussion disinhibited the rest of them enough that, before they had wandered off again, I found my genitalia on the receiving end of a lot more inquisitive examination by various members of their group, including some manual estimation of the size and weight of my balls.

By this point I was hopelessly drunk and offered no resistance. People picked me up and groped me and they were so visually blurry I couldn’t even tell if they were men or women. And I was so numbed I didn’t care. I had been repeatedly plied with alcohol throughout the night, and shamelessly accepted most of it. How could I refuse when the hosts were more than adequately stocked in whiskies and rums and liqueurs. If I didn’t sample it, it was only going to be wasted as ammo in the super soakers they were playing with outside around the poolside in the backyard.

In the back of my mind I knew I had to stop: at my size, passing out in some random place could be dangerous or even lethal, especially with so many other full size people drunk. A drunken person dancing or merely staggering around was basically a stampeding elephant.

I couldn’t hide from the reality: I was liked by the people, even loved by the people, but they did not actually care about me. When the blinders of alcohol had lifted, no one here would actually care where I’d ended up for the night, if I’d managed to get home at all, or had accidentally drowned at the bottom of the punch bowl.

Or maybe that was unfair. Almost no one.

—And the next second I heard a guy pipe up over the mumbling crowd:

“HE’S OVER THERE, I THINK,” and somehow instinctively knew the guy was talking about me, like when you think of someone and the next second they’re calling you on the phone.

“JERRY,” I heard Samantha’s crisp accent through the crowd. “ODDIO, I THOUGHT I’D NEARLY LOST YOU FOR A –”

She emerged from between some people, saw me, and froze.

I was buck naked and bathing inside a novelty oversized champagne glass held by a young, blonde, big busted woman, and up to my waist in a homemade chocolate martini as she swirled the end of her straw suggestively close to my package, sucking indulgently on the other end.

I lifted my head blearily and, wiping some condensation away from the inside of the glass, blinking out at Samantha for a moment as if I didn’t recognize her.

“Yo, yo, Freddi,” I nodded, for some reason thinking it would impress her if I showed I knew her last name by now. “I’m a bit busy at the moment. But I’ll talk to you in about ten, maybe twenty.” I took the straw between both my hands to keep it from wandering.

“WHO IS ‘BUSY’?” Samantha said slowly, as if not registering what she was seeing – or refusing to let it register.  “THIS IS A PARTY, NOT A CORPORATE BOARD MEETING.”

“If you just wait a moment, I’ve lost my clothes.”

“I CAN SEE THAT,” she said plainly. “HOWEVER, ‘LOST’ MAY NOT BE THE TERM YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.”

Composing herself, she strode up to the blonde woman holding the glass.

“SCUSI,” she said, deftly taking the big champagne glass from the woman’s hand. “I MUST HAVE A WORD WITH MY GUEST.”

The blonde pouted sulkily but all the same relinquished the glass and then wandered off to find some other entertainment.

Samantha slid the straw out, gave it a cursory, suspicious glance, and threw it away. Then her dark eyes dropped into the glass, and settled on me accusingly.

“Hey,” I slurred, slapping my hands over my erection, which was mercifully half hidden under the chocolate. “Kind of in the middle of something.”

“OH. IT LOOKED MORE LIKE YOU WERE REACHING THE END OF SOMETHING.”

“What did you want me for, anyway?” I drawled. I had been reaching the ‘end’ of something, and it had been denied me, and now I felt annoyed at her. Irrationally annoyed, but annoyed nonetheless.

“YOU THINK I MUST WANT SOMETHING? AREN’T I ALLOWED TO SIMPLY SPEAK WITH YOU?”

“You’re speaking with me right now.”

“BUT NOT UNDER THE MOST FAVORABLE CONDITIONS.”

She casually began to twirl the glass like a wine sampler, and I pressed my palms against the inside curvature of the glass, attempting to keep myself steady as I began to swirl around inside.

Then her hand dropped through the wide opening of the oversized glass and pinched me painfully as it fished me out.  She placed the glass down on a table off to the side and got a napkin to delicately wipe the chocolate off her hand. My dick was pointing out hard in the air, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. She was barely looking at me.

“I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN CAPABLE OF ATTENDING WITHOUT REQUIRING CONSTANT SUPERVISION,” she said quietly. “I ASSUMED YOUR SIZE DIDN’T LIMIT YOU IN THAT CAPACITY. WAS IT WRONG OF ME TO ASSUME THAT?”

“Ah, well…my size,” I shrugged. “The alcohol hits me like a tidal wave.” It wasn’t just the alcohol though, and I knew it. It was also the rush from being around so many normal sized people, and feeling like one of them, for the first time in a long time.

“I WOULD IMAGINE,” she said dispassionately. “YOU BECOME A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON.”

Maybe, but if I was different, I was happier. All of my previous encounters with alcohol had been tainted by ‘episodes’ involving – more specifically, incriminating – Jennifer. Now, I had drunk because I had wanted to, and I had enjoyed myself. And that was all. I wanted to explain this to Samantha but my tongue felt too heavy in my mouth.

Instead I said:

“Hey, you disappeared on me, remember? I had no idea where you went.”

“I SEE,” she murmured. “SO, BECAUSE I LEAVE THE ROOM, YOU GO AND MAKE A GIRLFRIEND OUT OF THE VERY NEXT WOMAN IN SIGHT?”

“It’s not like that! I don’t even know who that girl was!”

Judging by Samantha’s expression, that was not the right thing to say.

Before I could get another word out, I found myself rolled up tight inside a napkin and stuffed into her handbag.