“You know, if all that squirming doesn’t stop real fast, I think I will remove that stupid little suit for this,” Olivia warned as Daniel writhed helplessly in the softly caged arena of her curled fingers. They’d only just come back through the front door of her house, and he hadn’t ceased passively resisting for a single footfall of the journey back.

It was not a threat Daniel had to hear twice. Like a lightning bolt delivered directly from the unseen heavens, blocked as they were by the cocoon of his best friend’s giant fist, the words sent a jolt through the writhing teenager’s body that put an immediate end to his desperate rebellion. Planking within Olivia’s curled fingers, a shudder built on the anticipation of potentially the greatest embarrassment he might ever face in his lifetime. It was the only thing that functionally distinguished his forcibly prone, stiff form from that of a petrified wooden board.

Granted, he was still about to suffer one of the most embarrassing things Olivia could ever inflict upon him in his rather reduced state. Not for the first time, either. But while he felt that his towering friend’s words were probably a bluff and most likely a tease, hell if he was going to actually test that particular hypothesis.

Even if correct, continuing to act out would likely just annoy her. Greatly.

And that wasn’t a risk he was going to take when he still might have a chance of getting out of this with some level of dignity intact.

The cheery humming now making its way into his clammy confines didn’t speak particularly well of those odds, of course. A cheery Olivia was usually a good Olivia when it came to these moments of lie-induced vulnerability; relatively speaking, anyway. Just not so much when that cheeriness was paired with circumstances like this.

Even still, as his captor bounded through her house and to the bathroom adjoined by her room, there was no fiber of Daniel’s being that was going to give up on trying to get out of this without one last plea in spite of how poor the chances of success might be. He just plain refused to.

“Alright, Danny-Boy, you just sit tight while I give my hands a quick wash,” Olivia declared as they reached their destination. Her balled fist unfurled, fingers tilting so as to allow his stiff body to roll along off their well-worn undersides and onto the counter-top. “Can’t exactly get you clean if all this sweat just washes onto you, right?”

“Well, you don’t have to clean me,” Daniel offered weakly as he sat up, his aching body not at all pleased with actual movement on his part. The snicker his little suggestion earned from his towering friend was not particularly encouraging. Her formerly occupied hand moved to work the cold-water knob of the sink.

“I ran all the way to your house and then mushed you into my foot, shorty. I pretty much do have to clean you.”

“But you don’t have to do it,” Daniel replied just before a gentle torrent of water gushed forth from the faucet, jarring him despite knowing it was coming. Out of almost sheer morbidity, his eyes couldn’t help but track Olivia’s hands as they slid underneath the stream, twisting and turning to allow the cleansing liquid to wash over every square inch of the twin appendages.

“No, I’m actually certain that I’ve gotta do it,” came yet another jovial response, punctuated with yet another giggle. Daniel’s eyes remained glued to Olivia’s hands throughout this rather undesired response. She delivered a couple of quick pumps to the soap dispenser, ejecting some of the raspberry-red gel into the palm of her hand.

It was when those two hands met once again, rubbing that gel into a thick white lather, that the warning klaxons within the teen’s head truly began to sound. Particularly now that he could see himself being swallowed into the gap between Olivia’s hands, where her soft but firm flesh would roll over him. Over every part of him.

“Liv, please,” he all but begged upward as his friend’s cleaning came to an end with the last of the lather being washed from her hands, followed by a rightward turn of the same knob. “Please don’t. It’s embarrassing.”

“Nothing embarrassing about it, squirt,” Olivia casually retorted as her hands headed toward the hand towel hanging from the wall to temporarily whisk away the remaining moisture. “You’re really not in a position to do it, so I will.”

“But I could be,” he countered.

He obviously could.

“Oh, is that so?” Olivia questioned, now clearly amused as her emerald eyes found him again. The knuckles of her left hand rested rather condescendingly upon her hip.

“Yes!” he piped upward. Daniel was fully aware that this window being provided to him was not a large one, that it remaining open rested solely with his friend’s rather lacking patience. It truthfully wasn’t much of a shot, but he had to take it.

“You’re – first, you’re an inch tall – you’re an inch tall and you’re going to give yourself a bath? With no help from me?”

“Yes!”

“In my bathroom?”

“Yes!”

“In my sink?”

“Yes!”

“You – again, you’re an inch tall – you think you can just walk over to that knob and turn the water on?”

“Yes, I can!” Daniel shouted, exasperated at this point. So much so, in fact, that he didn’t give the slightest shit that he couldn’t possibly turn the knob in his current stature, even while knowledge of this technical falsehood existed in the back of his mind. He knew he couldn’t, though his lips had spoken otherwise, and this was when the mechanism of his brain ground to a halt. The gears clicked into place just a second too late to help.

Oh, no. No. No, no, no, no…

That sinking feeling hit him again. Not for long, thankfully, but enough to notice. A quarter of his already pretty pathetic height slashed away in an instant, a reflection on his hasty breach of the truth.

He didn’t bother hoping that his friend hadn’t noticed. It would have been a short-lived hope to begin with. Those playful emerald irises, now just a little further upward, glowered at him with an almost palpable disappointed anger. To make matters worse, Olivia’s chest was noticeably heaving with each labored breath she was taking.

How in the world had he let himself screw up like this?

The question reverberated in his brain as fear and a bad case of the shakes overcame him.

“Liv, I d-didn’t mean to…didn’t mean to do that,” he pleaded to the fuming young woman, hoping instead that this set of pleas would not fall upon deaf ears. “I r-really, really d-didn’t. I promise. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I wasn’t th-thinking, I j-just said it,” he continued, yammering on with increasing desperation. “I’m so sorry, Olivia, I didn’t mean to, I just…I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Olivia, please-“

“Stop,” came the rather curt order from up on high, megatons of frustration packed into just one little syllable. The matching countenance worked with her voice to silence him immediately and mercilessly.

It was with true fear that Daniel continued to look up into his best friend’s hardened eyes. His pleas would be for naught.

You never lied to Olivia again when you were still suffering the consequences of a previous breach of truth. Everyone who knew her knew this fact, and he had been the first person to learn it. It was a lesson that, much like the one regarding actually trying to flee from her, had only needed teaching just the once.

He had never, until now, given her reason to teach it again.

“Just…stop,” she repeated. Olivia closed her eyes and rubbed her temple, getting her breathing under control. For his part, Daniel was prepared for the worst, and that included the possibility that his friend’s earlier threat would now come to pass. He was pretty sure he’d rather take a ride inside Olivia’s shoe than have that happen, but considering the hole he had just dug for himself, having to experience both was a completely viable possibility.

To say he expected the next words that came out of the young woman’s mouth would have been the most catastrophic lie of Daniel’s limited life.