It was pitch black.

The blackness became an all-encompassing dreamless state merging sleep into wakefulness. Sometimes voices mumbled from somewhere, but it was unclear if these were real people in another part of the house, or just audio hallucinations.

It no longer seemed important where I was, what was happening or why anything happened. My body’s dwindling reserves of energy were used purely to keep my heart beating and make some weak attempts at repairing the pain in my muscles.

At some indistinct point in time, I became aware of the sound of male voices vibrating through the walls, the words low and indecipherable. Suddenly Samantha’s voice broke through, yelling with anger as I’d never heard it, and the sound shifted, like she was moving around, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her anger shocked me to the point I doubted if it was really her normally composed voice, as opposed to some other visiting female.

Then all the sounds stopped.

The black dreamless state consumed me again, and for a long while.

The drawer opened and the bright bedroom light poured down on my face.

When my stinging eyes had adjusted, I looked to see a huge foreign object racing down at me; like a blue balloon with pointy parts. It flexed around my body with surprising gentleness and lifted me up out of the drawer, hitting me with the undeniable smell of surgical gloves.

I was rotated until a huge man’s face materialized in front of me. He was an older man, with greying hair and a moustache, wearing a white shirt and tie with the sleeves rolled up, and blue surgical gloves on his hands.

“JERRY MOUSSEAU?” he said, with a slight frown. The air shook with his baritone voice. His breath smelled like cigarettes.

I nodded my head, wondering for a moment why my lips felt glued together before remembering they were taped over.

“FOUND OUR GUY,” the man called out down the hallway. Then he looked back down at me as he began to carry me out of the room, and added:

“YOU’RE A DIFFICULT MAN TO CHASE DOWN. BUT I LIKE TO THINK NO ONE CAN HIDE FOREVER.”

He put me on the dining table a moment as he took a pair of tweezers and carefully removed the tape from my mouth, as well as my arm and leg binds.

With the tape off, jolts of pain ran through my limbs as I tried moving them into a more comfortable position.

“NOT LOOKING SO GOOD THERE,” the man observed, “BUT JUST SIT TIGHT AND WE’LL HAVE YOU ALL CLEANED UP.”

The house was quiet. There was only one other person in the room, another man in similar attire, and also wearing rubber gloves, who had come over to inspect me.

“W-where’s Samantha?” I said. My voice didn’t come out properly the first time so I tried again.

“DON’T YOU WORRY ABOUT MISS FREDDI,” he replied. “WE HAVE SOME PEOPLE TAKING CARE OF HER.”

He carefully picked me up off the table again, causing my limp body to start trembling in pain. Everything went dark as my brain seemed to be doing somersaults inside my skull.

—Suddenly I was lying on a blanket on the back seat of a vehicle as it hummed down the road. The two men sat in the front seats, muttering to each other about various things to do with an investigation into my whereabouts.

I coughed and one of the men looked back at me briefly.

“HOW ARE YOU DOING BACK THERE, KID? OUR CLIENT WILL BE VERY PLEASED TO KNOW YOU’RE STILL KICKING.”

Then the car took some sharp, vertigo-inducing turns, and I passed out again.

*

Bright light was pressing in against my eyelids. There was a steady beeping sound somewhere to my right.

Large footsteps shuffled across a linoleum floor and abruptly stopped.

“OH MY GOD,” a female voice whispered somewhere nearby, “I DIDN’T KNOW WE HAD THE TINY GUY ON OUR WARD.”

“SOME P.I. MEN BROUGHT HIM IN LAST NIGHT,” a different female voice answered in a hushed tone. “ISN’T HE JUST THE MOST ADORABLE THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN?”

The other woman let out a small sound of surprise.

“OH DEAR…” There was some stifled giggling. “HIS LITTLE PECKER IS POKING UP. HE MUST BE HAVING A NICE DREAM.”

“LITTLE?” the first girl’s voice said. “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT THING! IT’S NEARLY AS BIG AS HE IS!”

“I BETTER FIX IT BEFORE THE DOCTORS COME BACK.”

Footsteps shuffled over and the brightness over my eyelids dimmed as a shadow stretched over me. Then the bed linen at my feet slid up over my body until my lower half was tucked in, although my dick was still pushing up against the sheet.

Once I heard the women leave, I rolled onto my side to hide my boner and went to sleep for another little while.

Hearing more footsteps, I sat up against a pillow, groaning. My boner had now gone. It seemed some time had passed.

The surrounding room appeared between slow, steady blinks.

I was sitting at the head of a normal sized bed in a hospital room, my tiny body dwarfed by, and propped up against, a normal sized pillow.

The towering figure of a nurse smiled down at me.

"HELLO THERE, DARLING. WELCOME BACK."

She slipped a cuff around my bicep. Noticing my look of surprise at the tiny blood pressure instrument, she explained it was the smallest one they could find in the hospital, and it was normally used for premature babies. Good thing my monstrous erection had subsided; I didn’t need a cuff put on it to tell me the state of my blood pressure in that department.

Once it finished, she read it out.

“IT’S A LITTLE HIGH, BUT I’M NOT SURPRISED WITH WHAT YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH.”

“How long have I been here?”

"YOU WERE ADMITTED YESTERDAY. WE'VE HAD YOU OVERNIGHT." She busied herself with the suspended bag of my IV line – a much tinier bag than usual; a ‘fun size’ bag.

Seeing the thin clear tube running into my arm gave me a panicked flashback to Samantha feeding me, but I quickly calmed myself. The room was white and bright and open, nothing like her bedroom, and Samantha herself was nowhere in sight.

A wave of calm made me close my eyes for a second.

"THE DOCTORS WANTED TO MONITOR YOUR CONDITION,” the nurse carried on. "YOU WERE IN A BAD STATE THERE FOR A LITTLE WHILE."

She switched on the TV for me before she left. I couldn’t get my eyes to focus enough to watch whatever was playing, but I was able to make out the date in the corner of the screen.

It was June.

But that couldn’t be right. Last time I was aware, it was May. I had been with Natalie for close to a month, between April and May. Which meant I must have been stuck in Samantha’s house for another whole month!

It wouldn’t process. It felt like time had been at a standstill in the drawer, and now suddenly I had jumped forward into the future.

I turned away from the TV screen and looked out the window, where the late afternoon sun was producing a mellow glow.

Not long after, a doctor in scrubs strode into the room and stood at the end of my bed to observe me.

“HI, JERRY,” he said. “I SEE YOU’RE AWAKE. HOW DO YOU FEEL?”

I wanted to say ‘like a piano fell on me’ but instead just muttered:

“Sore. And dizzy.”

He nodded.

“WE’LL GET YOU SOMETHING FOR THE NAUSEA, BUT I DON’T WANT TO GO TOPPING UP YOUR PAIN MANAGEMENT RIGHT NOW. WE DOSE BY BODY WEIGHT, AND YOU…” he gestured with a hand self-evidently, “…DON’T WEIGHT VERY MUCH.”

Striding over to the bedside, he crouched as he put the ear buds of his stethoscope into his ears and ran the opposite end over my chest. Unlike the other medical implements, it was normal size; the flat silver end of the stethoscope covered my entire torso.

“WHEN YOU CAME IN,” he explained, “YOU WERE RAMBLING AND YOUR EYES WERE UNFOCUSED. YOU WERE DEHYDRATED, SUFFERING FROM EXHAUSTION, DELIRIUM, AND MUSCLE INFLAMMATION. YOUR BODY WAS WORKING OVERTIME.”

Draping the stethoscope back around his neck, he added:

“YOU ALSO VOMITED SOME GROUND UP FOODSTUFF, LIKE PASTE – WHATEVER IT WAS YOUR CAPTRESS HAD BEEN FEEDING YOU. LET'S JUST SAY WHATEVER THAT CONCOCTION WAS, IT DIDN'T RATE WELL ON THE FOOD PYRAMID. IT WAS ENOUGH TO KEEP YOU ALIVE, BUT NOT MUCH ELSE."

She had wanted to keep me weak, I thought bitterly.

The doctor got to his feet again.

“BUT GREAT TO SEE HOW FAST YOU’VE BOUNCED BACK IN THE SHORT TIME YOU'VE BEEN HERE. YOUR VITALS ARE STRONGER. ASTONISHING, ACTUALLY. I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT. AT THIS RATE, YOU’LL BE BACK HOME BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.”

A look must have crossed my face, because the doctor hesitated.

“YOU HAVE LIVING ARRANGEMENTS, JERRY…?”

Well, that was complicated.

Except it wasn’t really.

“No,” I said.

I had no interest in getting Natalie on the phone and asking to move back in with her. The whole drama with Samantha was too humiliating to repeat to anyone; it needed to be expunged from memory as soon as possible.

“WHAT ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE WHO CAME BY EARLIER?” the doctor went on.

“People…?”

“NO ONE TOLD YOU? A COUPLE CAME THIS MORNING, JUST BEFORE I SWUNG BY TO CHECK IN ON YOU ON MY MORNING ROUNDS. A MAN AND A WOMAN. INTERESTING HAIR. THEY WANTED TO SEE YOU BUT YOU WERE STILL UNCONSCIOUS, AND WE THOUGHT YOU COULD USE SOME MORE REST, SO WE ADVISED THEM TO COME BACK LATER. THE WOMAN LEFT YOU A GIFT.”

“What?” I said, looking around.

He nodded at the bedside counter where there was a single rose standing in an empty bottle of licorice liqueur.

As I stared at it, the doctor turned to leave. I spoke up:

"You wouldn't happen to have any medicine to make a person grow in size, would you?"

He swung back around to face me with an uneven smile.

“WE HAVE ONE. BUT IT ONLY MAKES A PART OF YOU GROW, AND YOU NEED A PRESCRIPTION.”

There was beat, and then he added dryly:

“AND IN MY PROFESSIONAL OPINION – AT LEAST WHEN I CHECKED ON YOU THIS MORNING – YOU DON’T APPEAR TO NEED IT.”

Shortly, I was brought some crushed up tablets and a tiny plastic cup of water to drink the grainy powder down. This took care of my dizziness, allowing me to fall back into a more comfortable sleep for an hour or so.

Just after the sun had gone down, someone came and knocked on the door. I opened my eyes to see one of the nurses sticking her head in the doorway.

“YOU HAVE SOME VISITORS, DARLING,” she said quietly before disappearing again.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sharp clapping of heels down the corridor outside the room.

An instant later, Jennifer was standing in the doorway.

She had her hair in a ponytail, even longer than I’d last seen it, and was wearing a black spaghetti strap top and white handkerchief skirt, and – although I couldn’t see them from my elevated position on the bed – what sounded like a killer pair of heels, catapulting her leg muscles up into heaven.

Beginning to feel dizzy again, I glanced around for some more anti-nausea meds, but I’d already swallowed them all.

Her green eyes alighted on me and in an instant she had swooped to the bedside, and the upper half of her great visage was leaning over me, peering into my face anxiously, taking in my doped up eyes, gaunt face, spiky uncut hair and Jesus-length beard.

“EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY,” she said. “I’M HERE NOW.”

Unable to help herself, her hands started forward and then were all over me; pawing at my chest, kneading my shoulders, cradling my jaw with her fingertips as she examined my beard growth. It was like she needed to know I was actually physically there, and not an illusion. Then, pulling my sheet down a little further, her fingertips slowed down to trace my exposed rib bones and gently probe around my sunken stomach. Her brow drew tight with concern. Only now I realized my captivity had caused my form to waste somewhat.

Because I was still so tender from the treatment I’d received in Samantha’s possession, my muscles trembled and recoiled at all of this fondling. I shrank from her, trying to scoot deeper under the white linen.

Stuart’s voice sounded gently from behind her.

“I THINK YOU’RE ALARMING HIM A LITTLE, HONEY.”

Ignoring him, she lowered her head, trying to get it into alignment with my line of vision, and get my eyes to return to hers.

“YOU’RE GLAD TO SEE ME, AREN’T YOU?”

I gave a big nod without even thinking.

Unable to hide her relief, she tickled my belly with her long nails, which caused my insides to cramp. There was a lot less padding on my stomach now, making it feel like her nails were swirling around in my intestines. I pushed back at her fingers, shaking my head but unable to speak because I was coughing so hard.

Withdrawing her hand from me, she got a wounded look; not as if I’d spurned her, but as if she was afraid she’d hurt me. Then, with utmost gentleness, she took my hand between her fingertips and held it, completely enveloping my hand in her soft skin.

A chair across the room creaked as Stuart eased down into it. Only now I could see him, and he looked very tired and pale, and when he gave me a look over, his expression looked a little pained, like the sight of me was even worse.

The weight of my recklessness crashed down on me. For the first time, guilt gnawed at my gut for what I must have put them through all this time. They had looked after me all this time and I had run away and not told them where I’d gone. And why? Because they got sexually rowdy one night after too many drinks? Compared to how Samantha had treated me, it now seemed comparatively mild. And I could have paid dearly for it: I could have gone a long time in the drawer without being found, maybe even died in there.

With my hand still between Jennifer’s fingertips, I moved my other hand and placed it on top of her thumbnail. She had applied a new coat of polish since I’d been gone and it felt like a smooth glazed window, and was so shiny I probably could have caught my reflection in there – though, judging how I felt, that probably wasn’t a good idea.

“I could have done a better job of this,” I joked, slapping her nail.

“GOOD,” she said coolly, “BECAUSE ONCE YOU’RE BETTER, IT’S BACK TO POLISHING DUTY FOR YOU.”

They made some easy-going conversation with me, telling me some things that had gone on while I’d been away. Mostly they talked and I listened. They didn’t ask me where I’d been or what had happened to me. At first, this was a relief, but then the conspicuous absence of questions made my insides churn with shame: if the P.I. had told them I’d been found in a lingerie drawer of some socialite model, my wrists, ankles and mouth taped up, my naked body, bruised, red, and smelling like musky pussy, they were in a good position to figure out the finer details.

While I listened to them talk; just enjoying the comforting sound of their voices, my torso was being rubbed soothingly with the pads of two of Jennifer’s fingers, as if it was molding clay and by applying the right pressure, she could get the normal shape to return. Unfortunately for me, because her nails were so long and I was so comparatively diminutive, every so often I would feel a sudden pricking sensation as one of the sharp nail tips accidently dug into my flesh, without her even realizing.

Wincing, I would give her fingers a firm squeeze whenever it was getting too much, whereon she would get the message and slide her hand away for a little while. Then her fingernails would drum anxiously on the mattress for a few minutes, before inevitably snaking back over to me again.

It could have been the familiar association of the powerful fragrance she was wearing, or the silky touch of her warm, moisturized hands, or the dark glittering of her mascara-defined lashes fluttering as she cocked her head down at me in concern, or just the shocking pleasure of seeing her again at all. Whatever it was, it was causing the sheet covering my lower body to steadily rise up.

The rest of my body might have been wasted down, but judging by the tent pole emerging between my thighs, my dick was as healthy and thick as ever.

For a couple of moments it seemed the manifest arousal would go away on its own. When that did not happen, it seemed possible I could disguise it under the sheet if I shifted my body right. That did not work either.

And then her fingers hovered over my chest. She was very still for a moment.

Then my chest was being rubbed again. I sunk against the pillow in a silent sigh.

But as this was going on, and without any other perceptible reaction, her thumb nimbly swept behind and beneath my member, compelling it back until it was pressed against my stomach. As her first two fingertips continued to rub my chest, she held her thumb against my lower stomach, keeping my dick firmly trapped, and shifting back and forth agonizingly with the slight movements of her hand.

Stuart hadn’t reacted. From his position in the chair at the side of the hospital bed, Jennifer’s huge hand must have been obscuring most of my tiny form.

I flicked my eyes up at her in the desperate, futile hope she didn’t realize what she was doing, but her eyes were fixed on me calmly and when I looked at her, she winked at me, out of Stuart’s line of sight.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

Stuart’s voice just droned on merrily, relaying an anecdote he intended as funny. Jennifer was nodding and making noises of interest, insisting he continue talking.

Meanwhile, my penis was beating like a drum. A drum being played by the subtle manipulations of her touch.

Oh God, I thought, I’m going to—!

My doctor, in his infinite wisdom, chose that very moment to enter the room.

The rubbing carried on over my stomach, and lower. I pushed my head back against the pillow, hard, as if trying to sink into it. Pulsations of hot blood were working through my system, a beautiful lightness spreading all over, taking me away from the pain.

“GOOD AFTERNOON, FOLKS,” said the doctor. “I HEARD YOU HAD A QUESTION FOR ME.”

Without stopping what she was doing, Jennifer smoothly turned her head and looked at him.

“YES, I—”

Then my dick exploded into the sheet and I made a sound like a sharp eruption of breath and a loud groan.

Everyone looked at me.

The doctor looked concerned.

“YOU ALRIGHT THERE, JERRY?”

I mopped the perspiration from my brow, not saying anything or looking at anyone.

“HE JUST SNEEZED,” Jennifer giggled . “BLESS YOU.”

“OH,” said the doctor, nodding. “SORRY – YOU WERE SAYING?”

Finally her hand moved from me, and I surreptitiously rolled onto my side to give my spent dick some time to return to a flaccid state. Jennifer stood up from the bedside to face the doctor and meet him in the eyes.

“CAN WE TAKE HIM HOME?”

The doctor looked between her and Stuart.

“ARE YOU GUYS FAMILY OR –?“

“I’M HIS LEGAL GUARDIAN,” she asserted.

“SHE IS,” Stuart clarified quickly, “NOT ME.”

That was news to me. I didn’t even know she’d applied, and I was aware the process could take months, so if she’d been appointed, she must have applied before I’d run away. Then again, I was in no state to take care of myself right now. Maybe it was the morphine talking, but if it meant staying out of Samantha’s hands, I would have happily signed my full possession over to Jennifer right there and then.

The doctor slipped a pen out and began noting something up on the chart near my bed as he spoke:

“WE WANT TO KEEP HIM ONE MORE NIGHT, JUST TO MONITOR HOW THE DRUGS ARE INTERACTING WITH HIS SYSTEM. WE’VE NEVER HAD A PATIENT LIKE HIM BEFORE SO WE WANT TO BE DILIGENT.”

Jennifer bowed her head. Her face was blank, but her hands, at her sides, were flexing restlessly.

Stuart got to his feet again.

“SOUNDS FAIR ENOUGH TO ME. THANK YOU, DOC.”

The doctor nodded and left.

Stuart then turned to me, putting his hands in his pockets.

“WE’LL BE SEEING YOU TOMORROW THEN, I GUESS, JERRY.”

He placed his hand against the small of Jennifer’s back as he moved past her, to coax her into following him out the room. As soon as he’d moved through the doorway, she swished around and dropped back down by my side.

“DON’T GO ANYWHERE,” she murmured, too low for anyone else to have heard. As she leaned in closer, her lips brushed against my cheek. “I LOVE YOU.”

Drawing back, a devilish smirk only now broke free of the sustained expression of concern she'd worn throughout the entire visit.

“AND I CAN TELL YOU’RE VERY HAPPY TO SEE ME TOO.”

Then, just as quickly, she was gone again.