Tom had to give his sister Alaina credit for dedication to her research as a few trickles of cool wind whipped gratefully against his cheeks, having managed to reach his slimy and heat-cooked body under the duct of the gigantic seventeen-year-old’s vigorously sweating armpit, where she had him taped under several layers of gummy material.
She’d tried other adhesives before. Masking, duct, even gorilla glue tape, which he knew couldn’t be particularly pleasant on her skin. And he knew personally, because it was usually simultaneously attached to his own body whenever she used it to entrap him somewhere on her person once he was small enough and lacking in the necessary musculature to escape the sticky prison.
Still, none of these crafty strips proved useful in the long run, at least not for Alaina’s purposes. Which, coincidentally, happened to be long runs. It hadn’t been so bad a few years ago when she’d only been focusing on speed and improving her mile time, meaning Tom just had to endure being taped to his sister’s overheated and massive machine of a body while she ran for short, hellish, though endurable bursts of time.
But no more. Now, she was only interested in taking it further, opening it up with a jog then working in a few interval sprints as she crossed from the neighborhood and into the nearby subdivision, taking every cul-de-sac and every dead end on purpose to drag out the distance. She was certainly getting better, too, crossing about eight miles now in less than an hour and a half: not bad for someone who wasn’t even on the cross country or track teams.
Of course, given that she preferred to bring Tom along on these ventures if he happened to be small enough to require consequences for whatever word vomit he’d committed that day, the endurance rounds were made difficult. Ordinary tape could hang on for forty minutes, maybe fifty before it started to peel away under the relentless deluge of her salty sweat absolutely teeming from every one of the girl’s smooth pores.
Tom, too, was generally worse for wear after being so thoroughly soaked in his sister’s secretions that his hair was matted down and his body pruned as though he’d taken a daylong bath, but this was hardly a concern to the girl. Really, the main reason for all the time she’d put into discovering the correct tape for their jogs “together” was to ensure Tom wasn’t lost in a grassy knoll somewhere at just a few inches tall and half a dozen miles from home because the tape failed to hold. While he largely didn’t appreciate having to marinate in the sweltering heat and sopping musk of Alaina’s enthusiastically sweating body, Tom had to agree this was a good choice as a top priority.
Eventually, her energy did pay off, thanks to a few tips from online forums run by other aficionados of encouraging truth through more extreme means than the average waggled finger. Though most of those digital discussions weren’t intended to allow for a shrunken liar to be taped up during exercise, but merely to be worn as body jewelry until the effects had worn off, Alaina had stumbled on a sixty-page listing that detailed exactly what she was looking for, plus a link to the obscure store that sold tape even more powerful than gorilla glue that was capable of keeping Tom squeezed against her swollen skin no matter how heavily she sweated. Now, anything was possible. Anything.
And today, Alaina had chosen to position her now four-inch sibling into her armpit: a pocket of decidedly spicy aroma, generating an odor of rancid depth unlike quite any other place on the teen’s body, or at least the locations the toy-sized Tom had been taped.
Obviously some regions were off-limits by Alaina’s decree, thank goodness, but most of them could be relied on for a certain level of regular airflow. Even being attached to the girl’s pounding thighs, rough a ride as it was on each seismic clash of her trainers with the concrete so far below, was preferable in certain ways. At least he could swallow full breaths down there, and feel the rush of the breeze on his body. This especially was appreciated and even necessary, as Tom tended to inherit the near-boiling temperature of his sister’s athletic form as she tanned and allowed the sun’s rays to bake her already overworked limbs.
Unfortunately, no such luck was to be had. Alaina hadn’t been in what Tom could charitably call one of her “good” moods when Emma had walked into the house after school with their little brother curled up like a gerbil in her palm at a humiliating height just shy of four inches. He’d made a feeble attempt to cling onto his younger sister’s protective thumb before being snatched away on a chorus of enraged shrieks from Alaina, but he knew it was futile even before her trembling fist had clawed its way for him. The girl was liable to get what she wanted, and what she wanted, regrettably, at that moment, was to blow off some steam with a nice, leisurely six-mile run in the seventy-eight-degree weather.
With her miniature brother taped firmly into the foulest crevice of her torso industrial-strength adhesive.
His sunburned skin melded stingingly into the tender skin, luckily freshly shaved with her favorite purple razor, as Alaina was a stickler for any kind of stubble appearing on her feminine form, so Tom was saved from itching on the back of his neck as he was continually jostled by the constantly colliding walls of flesh consisting of her toned arm and chest. However, he wasn’t saved from very much else.
Even ten minutes in, given how the air was trapped inside with such aggressively feverish efficiency, Alaina started to sweat. Tom’s hair was affected first, with trickles of it seeping stickily into his already mussed locks, but he was able to put this aside and instead focus on timing the occasional whiff of air that didn’t smell like year-old vinegar. As the minutes wore painfully on.
Chafing eventually became a problem, too, with the slightly doughy underside of Alaina’s firm bicep brushing by his face every half-second without much care as to whether or not she was starting to rub away at crucial parts of his head.
It wasn’t long before the boy’s skin was stroked a deep, raw red, leaving him entirely vulnerable to the sopping, singing sensations of the potently salty excretions rapidly increasing their load as they poured by the fetid gallon from Alaina’s flesh. Every drop started to take its toll with refreshed strength, no longer merely dribbling down Tom’s desperately welting body, but seeping into his own skin, absorbing the liquids that couldn’t escape the darkness of the girl’s putrefied pit.
Near the end, enough of the sudor had collected in a gooey, crystalline mess along the entire curved wall of Alaina’s armpit, covering Tom’s body generously too, that it couldn’t even begin to leak out at a fast enough pace. So, it was left to fester, inhaled painfully up Tom’s nostrils on every necessary gulp of oxygen to keep on breathing regularly. Though he was a little too dizzy to know for sure, the liar couldn’t help but make the comparison of those flavors to some European spice traders’ wares allowed to mummify over a century before cooked into the soup that now comprised Alaina’s absolutely abominable sweat. His brain swam with the sensation of overturning continually in a swimming pool until his entire cavity had been flooded with the horribly salty juices still-gushing from his older sister’s beast of a form.
Now, with every regrettable gulp, he felt a fresh mouthful of the hot liquids rush down his gullet and churn like a chemical reaction in his stomach about to implode with nuclear force.