Her old place was right where she’d left it. In fact, it hadn’t budged more than a couple times for twelve straight years, even after it was left empty following Lexi’s move to her own more stationary place in the city. No matter how far she traveled, it was clear now that this was her true bedroom. Not the place downtown where she’d encountered Kayla Everett, and certainly not any of the short-lease locations she’d bopped around during her healing excursions these past months. This place.
Lexi stood on the table in front of her portable Alpha apartment after Evelyn dropped her off in the Cade guest room. Her private quarters looked like little more than an upturned breadbox by comparison to its Omega surroundings. Even before she could lay a hand on the doorknob, though, Lexi was startled by something, or rather the lack of something. It took her a moment to place, but once she took notice, she had to let go of the door and step back.
The brick-patterned housing unit was missing its roof.
###
“Are you sure this is a good idea, Lexi?” Bridget murmured, nibbling her lip and anxiously shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“Why not? It’ll be so pretty!”
“Well, yeah, but don’t you think this is too much?” The young Omega hoisted the flower pot off the guest room carpet. Her fingers trembled beneath the heavy faux-porcelain, containing several tons of soil and Omega-strain flowers already sprouting higher than average-sized trees in all manner of firework hues. She held the pot aloft at the level of her adoptive sister’s dollhouse-sized home. “This is heavier than your house. I know, cuz I can carry your house super easy. Why don’t we just put it next to it?”
“Aww, it’ll be okay! I just want to see what it looks like with the flowers on top of the house,” Lexi wheedled. She walked to the edge of the table and tugged at the hem of her gigantic cohort’s shirt. “Pleeeeease, Bridge? Please, please, please?”
“They DO look really nice…”
“See, you see it too! Maybe if you just put it down really gentle, it’ll be okay.”
“I don’t think it’ll balance on top of the roof.”
“Well, you can take the roof off, right? Then we could just sit it on the top, and the flowers could BE the roof!”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Though Lexi couldn’t see the Omega’s face above, with the blossoming flowers blocking her way, she could hear the smirk in the voice. Despite her obvious worries, Bridget had caught the gleeful bug of this miniature redecorating venture. She set the pot down on the table with aching slowness while continually eying her tiny friend to be certain she was well-clear of its glassy diameter.
“This is such a good idea.”
“It is gonna look really pretty,” Bridget affirmed. The towering blonde hooked her thumbs under the slanted roof of the box-house to find the latches, freed them, then gingerly pried the entire top of Lexi’s house off the reinforced walls. She set it on the floor, careful to nudge it away from the table with her toes to avoid the risk of accidentally snapping it in half with a misplaced footfall.
“Well?”
“Here goes nothing,” the Omega said, no longer stifling her wide smile. She took a deep breath and picked the enormous flowerpot back up between both hands. “I’m gonna be so jealous of your house, Lexi. My room doesn’t have anything on top of it. The tops of all the Omega houses are flat.”
“It’s okay, you can come visit mine anytime you want, once I have the prettiest house in the house,” Lexi teased.
The girls broke into mischievous giggles as Bridget lowered the vast porcelain vessel into the opening of the box, allowing it to rest on the thinner walls of the individual rooms rather than the much-sturdier roof. Careful as ever, the Omega let go, then slowly withdrew her fingers, in case the slightest gust would cause the whole complex to topple.
“Huh,” Bridget remarked. She took a step back and crossed her arms. “You were right, Lexi. It looks sooooo nice. It’s like your house is half-garden.”
“Hey, I wanna see! I can only see the bottom flowers from down here, but not the really good top ones with all the big red petals!” Lexi whined, jumping up and down from the edge of the table. “Come back! Pick me up!”
“Oops, sorry. Hold on.” Bridget swooped back to the table and lowered her palm beside her tiny friend just long enough for Lexi to clamber aboard the plush plank of her fingers. With the Alpha on board, the taller girl took several steps back for the full effect. She lifted her flattened hand aloft at the level of her own eyes, so both sisters could have the same view of Lexi’s florally revamped home.
“Wow…” Lexi breathed. She lowered to her knees and crept over the fleshy platform of Bridget’s hand, until she’d reached the very tips of the girl’s outstretched fingers. Instinctively, the Omega’s index and middle digits curved up into a slight lip as fencing, which Lexi hardly acknowledged, wanting the best view of her abode. “You picked good flowers, Bridge.”
“I did?”
“Yeah! I’m just kinda sad it’ll be hard to see from inside the house,” Lexi continued. She appreciatively patted the rounded curve of Bridget’s thumbpad. “Why don’t the people at the Alpha houses factory make them all like this, instead of just boring with a regular roof?”
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know why,” Bridget pondered.
At that moment, the inner walls of the house buckled like crackers beneath the intense weight of Evelyn Cade’s heaviest flowerpot. Tipping forward, a broad hairline crack split down the vessel as it crushed the whole top layer of the house and crashed into the first floor. Soil poured through the miniature rooms and leathery petals of the sideways flowers thrust through the empty window frames.
Bridget gasped, cupping her free hand over her mouth to quell her surprised panic, though her opposite arm remained just as steady. She blinked several times, shocked and unsure what to do as half of Lexi’s portable house was outright smashed by broken flowerpot while the other half was bathed in mud and chlorophyll.
“Hmm…” Lexi observed, bobbing her head. “Um, I guess it won’t be that hard to see the flowers from inside the house now?”
The Alpha was just about to crack another joke when she heard curious sniffling from above. Craning her neck around, she looked up to find her best friend’s eyes gleaming with pre-emptive moisture. Her nostrils flared and she sniffled again.
“Bridge, what’s wrong?”
“I just broke your whole house!” the Omega blurted. Her upper body trembled as she tried to gulp the tears back down. “Lexi, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s my fault. You were saying we shouldn’t do it at first, but I got you to do it.”
“But I’m still the one who did it!” The young Omega knelt on the carpet and wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand, only for the tears to well up again. “All your stuff is in there. A lot of it’s probably all dirty now or just broken!”
“So? It’s just stuff,” Lexi shrugged. She frowned, not quite following the source of her friend’s sorrow. Unsure how to proceed, she patted her friend’s thumb again, more soothingly this time. “I just don’t want your mom to be mad about it.”
“We’ll tell her it was all my fault.”
“No, I’ll tell her it was my fault.”
“You can’t do that, Lexi.”
“Yes I can. I’ll go do it right now!” Lexi threatened, still half-joking. She stood up in Bridget’s hand and pretended to walk toward the edge of her palm, even extending her narrow leg up and over the cushy barrier of her friend’s log-like finger. “Here I go.”
“NO!” Bridget squealed, apparently taking the girl too seriously in her state of guilty agitation. Swiftly, the Omega’s opposite hand came down atop the other. Though careful not to strike Lexi, the giantess nonetheless pinned her friend between both palms and cupped her fingers together, ensuring the girl couldn’t take an injurious leap off her hand to the carpet below.
“I wasn’t really gonna do it,” Lexi coughed from between the sandwich of her giant friend’s warm hands. She slapped her thumb as though tapping out of a wrestling match. “Did I get you?”
“No,” Bridget grunted, then cleared her throat. She separated her hands again so Lexi could sit up again. “Maybe a little.”
###
Lexi turned the knob and entered the place where she’d grown up. Going inside was easier than she expected. It didn’t inflict the same kind of heart-lurching difficulty as when she let herself inside the cavernous Omega apartment earlier, which she was grateful for. She’d been through enough stomach churning for one day after her homecoming with Evelyn.
Crossing the threshold, Lexi walked by the empty kitchen and living room, up the stairs, and returned to her bedroom. Every step was a little surreal, but thankfully devoid of ache. In fact, it was a tremendous comfort to return. For now, the Alpha desperately just wanted to settle back in. There was so much to think about, namely the fact that Bridget had banished herself from home just as Lexi had these twenty-one months. However, there was no way she could begin to think about such things until she’d found her footing here again.
Not to mention, the fearful part of Lexi was grateful to defer that reunion with Bridget a bit longer.
The mattress was barren, though Evelyn had reassured Lexi she had sheets for it stored away in a linen box somewhere. Until her gigantic surrogate mother returned with them, the Alpha had a little time to reacquaint herself. She sat on the edge of the bed and dropped her suitcase on the ground. At first she thought to start unpacking, but the very fact of being back was so daunting already, Lexi shrugged and kicked her luggage beneath the headboard.
Not much remained of this room aside from the bed and dresser. Most of the portable apartment furniture had been hauled off to her own place when she moved in just a matter of months before she was framed and sent down a catastrophic spiral. Bridget had skillfully transported the entirety of Lexi’s belongings in one hand.
###
“This is why every house should have a removable roof,” Bridget said on moving day. The twenty-two-year-old loomed over the buildings while standing in the street, watching Alpha movers double-team the furniture, which the golden-haired Omega could’ve finished off with just two fingers, if only given access to the interior. “This whole thing would take, like, forty seconds if I could get my hands in there.”
“You think so?” Lexi joked from inside her open-topped portable apartment, where she was directing movers on which pieces to take. “I guess you just want in so you can ruin this one, too, by dropping a garden inside it?”
“Do NOT bring back my childhood trauma again!” Bridget retorted, though just as suddenly she broke into uncontrollable guffaws with Lexi. She pretended to aim an accusing giant finger at her sister, coming several inches away from jabbing her in the chest, but stopped just short. “I cried about that time for a whole week when I was twelve, and you know it, you jerk.”
“Hey, I got over it faster than it happened, and it was MY house that got smashed!” Lexi laughed. She took a step forward until her body was pressed against Bridget’s finger, as though daring her to act. “Your mom didn’t even care. Don’t you remember? Even SHE laughed about it.”
“Oh, whatever. I’m just mad I can’t move things around for you here like I could at the old place. Seriously, that was super-convenient for redecorating your house every other week, and you know it,” Bridget scowled, smiling broadly. Gingerly as a peacock feather, she dabbed her fingertip at Lexi’s cheeks instead of poking her in the chest, then retracted her enormous hand.
“Uh-huh. And you’re one hundred percent sure it’s not just because you liked having access to a toy dollhouse that someone also lived in?”
“Oh, it’s completely about that. Did I give you the impression it was another reason?” Bridget fired back. The two young women were so slap-happy they could barely hold still. Softening her sarcasm then to match her actual mood, the Omega knelt down in the street and cupped her hand just outside the window of the apartment, which was nearly emptied by now. “Are you coming out?”
Lexi pointed out the last box in her bedroom to the movers, then went to the window. Looking around the empty space one last time, she could plainly make out the peachy platform of her best friend’s waiting palm. It was always this kind of moment which reminded the Alpha that she wasn’t living in a “real” house, but instead the equivalent of a cat carrier to people hundreds of times her size. There were indeed occasions in her adolescence when she did feel a bit like living in a dollhouse, no matter how much privacy and respect she was paid by Lexi and Evelyn, who never removed the roof, let alone plucked the door open between their fingers, without express permission first. Yet Lexi had never minded knowing her home was but a boxed accessory in the fortress of far greater beings. It made her feel safe. Always had, and always would.
“You’d better send me at least two hundred pictures of the inside once you’ve got it all set up,” Bridget said as the little brunette climbed through the window and plopped into her humongous sister’s palm. The Omega arose to full stature again once her charge was safely in, with her arms wrapped around her thumb. “Just so you understand, two hundred is the minimum. I’m still secretly pissed you couldn’t get a place with a better view of the street so I could see inside.”
“It’s gonna look like a dump for a few days until I get everything unpacked. And it might still look like a dump after that.”
Lexi reclined across the smooth, heated pad of her friend’s hand. She peered over the side down at her house far below. It was missing the roof and nearly bare otherwise. Suddenly, the prospect of moving out felt realer than ever, and the usually cavalier Alpha felt the twinge of nostalgia at the back of her throat. It was funny because Lexi had always been under the impression you wouldn’t know you were shifting life phases until you were already well into the next one. But right now, the twenty-year-old was very conscious that she was pressing forward. She felt smaller than ever, and not just because a titaness was holding her whole life in her hand.
“Okay,” Bridget sighed. She cupped her free hand under her elbow, propping Lexi higher up, until she was level with the Omega’s chin. Her wide lips curved at the corners. “So after it’s unpacked, then, and not a second later.”
“Deal.”
###
Pacing circles around the room, Lexi could feel the dollhouse sensation returning. There wasn’t even a monstrous hand waiting outside the window to collect her, nor a pair of leering dinner plate-eyes to suggest nature had a pecking order. She still felt it, though.
Never for a single moment of her youth, following the escape from her birth mother and adoption into the Cade clan, had Lexi been made to feel like the toyish occupant of this place. Bridget would have become furious at the mere notion of doing anything to “belittle” Lexi further than their natural size difference already implied. The blonde never wanted to dress her tiny friend up, and never wanted to play dolls with Lexi standing in for one of the plastic figures. If they played dolls, Lexi would always puppeteer her own avatar, no matter how absurd it may have looked to an outsider.
This was the same place she’d lived for more than half her life, and certainly the half she cherished and remembered much better. Yet today, there was something askew. Isolation was creeping in fast, and Evelyn had scarcely left the guest room ten minutes ago. Lexi slumped on her bed, running her fingers through dark strands of hair, and grappled with her confused feelings. When she turned to face the wall, she pressed her forehead to a conspicuous crack in the surface spackled with so much glue it now looked like amber frozen in time.
Oh, Bridge.
###
“It’ll be exactly the way it was. Exactly!” Bridget frantically reassured her little sister.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes I do! I broke your house, so now I have to fix it.”
The young Omega’s self-seriousness was off the charts, and there was nothing but determined conviction in her soft words. She laid on her stomach upon the bedroom carpet for maximum stability and held one of the many ravaged walls of Lexi’s portable house before her crystal-blue eyes, squinting and fidgeting as she painted on glue a gallon at a time. Her tiny partner-in-crime sat cross-legged several feet away from where Bridget’s fingers inexpertly crafted.
“You missed a spot,” Lexi snickered.
“Where? Where!”
“I’m just kidding, Bridge. It looks perfect. There’s enough glue on there now, I bet.”
“No, it doesn’t look perfect. It’s still a mess.” Bridget sighed, hanging her head. Her fingers paused their work, and the glue brush was deposited back in the well.
“I like it, though,” the Alpha said. “It’ll look different from all the other houses like it. That was what we were trying to do before, right?”
“Yeah, but that was when we were trying to put flowers on your roof. Not crack all the insides,” Bridget defended. The Omega brushed several yellow locks out of her view, batted her eyelashes, and continued with the kind of surgical precision needed to split an atom.
Lexi beamed, highly entertained by the sight of her sister’s colossal fingers holding up entire heavy walls of the house like they were made of construction paper.
“C’mon. Can you put it inside now, so we can see it?”
“Okay, here goes.” Bridget wiped down the last of the glue, ensuring the pieces of the bedroom wall would hold together, then guided the square back into its interlocking notches. After Lexi had climbed back up the reconstructed stairs, the girls studied the refurbished house in staid silence.
“It looks like crap,” the Omega said. Lexi wanted to laugh, but her friend sounded so forlorn, it seemed rude.
“No, I even like it better now! Plus, it’s special, cuz now you helped make my house, instead of just the people in the Alpha houses factory. Honest. Seriously, it’s the best house ever.”
“You promise?” Bridget asked.
“I promise.”
Giantess World
