Having just been told he was about to be inserted into his self-proclaimed owner’s mouth, Peter kept his face stoic as a sphinx.
“All right,” he said without blinking.
“Really?” Mandy uttered, raising her eyebrows. She was so flabbergasted by his apparent peace with the situation that she, for a split-second, seemed to entirely forget that she was fully in control, regardless of his wishes. Her tongue clucked against the roof of her mouth, her lips held agape to show it off. “You’re telling me… if I put you in my mouth right now. Where I eat stuff… that you’re just gonna do it? You’re not gonna complain and yell and turn into a little sissy scaredy-cat baby all over again like last night?”
“Yes,” he humbly replied.
Yet again Mandy needed a moment just to get her bearings, but she recovered faster this time, too eager to both test his mettle, and then actually experience the thing she was threatening. Her head was clearly spinning with the enhanced array of activities now at her disposal. The creativity of it all seemed on the verge of making her dizzy enough to pitch forward, but she kept her cool, lifting Peter closer toward her face, until he could feel her hot breath wafting stickily around him in the mid-morning chill.
“Doesn’t it make you afraid, though, that I’ll accidentally swallow you? Huh?” Mandy’s voice rose, aggressive and passionate all at once, laying all her remaining cards on the table at once. Her wild eyes boggled anew like small wet moons. “C’mon, Peter Rabbit, admit it. Aren’t you at least a little bit scared that I might chomp you into bits on accident, or beat you up with my big tongue, or just gulp you straight down in my belly, where it’s all burny and gross and you’ll just pop out at the other side?”
“I am scared,” Peter admitted, which was the least deceitful thing he’d said to her this morning. Coming that close to the literal belly of the beast was nothing to discount. Though frankly, he was much more apprehensive of her instead simply gagging on his body and likely killing them both in the process of choking. However, he had to admit, if anyone possessed the requisite combo of dogged determination and animalistic tendency needed to actually swallow a five-inch-tall being, it was Mandy Delaney. Didn’t bad guys do it with drug balloons on late-night crime shows all the time? “But I meant what I said. I’m yours now. I have to do what you say, so you’ll see that I want things to be good from now on between us. That I want to be a good pet.”
“I think if you keep this up, you will be a good pet. And maybe good at some other stuff too, after we turn you back into a fairy,” Mandy hungrily whispered. She held Peter’s face an inch from her gummy lips, which she continued to obsessively lick while huffing out stale morning breath. Another shade of unfamiliar emotion manifested in her tone which Peter didn’t recognize, until he judged by the needful gleam in her eye, and the sweep of her opposite hand across her thighs and over the union zone between them, precisely what type of feeling was infecting the girl’s voice. In case it wasn’t already excruciatingly plain to both of them, Mandy’s interest in fairy’s definitely extended beyond the artistic.
“Thank you,” Peter said, two of the hardest words he’d ever had to speak aloud in his life. But at this point, he had one very particular image locked to his mind’s eye, guiding him forward, and nothing would break him now. Well, unless of course Mandy actually did manage to swallow him on accident. That might break him, then dissolve him, then… nope.
With a final winning smirk, the girl separated her jowls as far apart as they’d go, and to her credit, she managed to get it pretty far: more than enough space to cram Peter inside. She started with his legs, sliding them down the waiting slimy plank of her tongue. Her cushy yet wind-flaked lips scraped squishily past with every move. Instantly his tunic fabric became soaked with saliva and clung to his legs, darkening and thinning as the liquid sopped through. Sensing a presence in her mouth, possibly something edible, Mandy’s salivary glands started seeping. Her fingers expertly fed him into her wide-open maw a fraction of an inch at a time, almost surgical in her precision. Taking him deeper, spit started flooding up around the boy’s ankles. The walls of her cheeks quivered as Peter’s heels reached the back of her tongue, threatening to kick her uvula and activate a reflex, but Mandy was prepared for this. She suppressed the instinct, then used her thumbs to bend the boy forward into a more fetal position, making it easier to fit him inside. This prevented him from touching the back of her throat, while still allowing more and more of the boy’s five-inch frame to vanish into her steaming, smelly jaws.
This experience was just about as unpleasant as Peter had imagined and steeled himself for, though there were still nasty sensory surprises to be made in the act of living through it. He had been up close with many normal-sized human mouths in his time, and learned to ignore the warm mist and post-meal stench that only a tiny person could notice; he’d even been licked before, not often, but generally against his will, with his own little sister cheekily numbering among that list, and that gesture too Peter had managed to compartmentalize. It was just a big pink rubbery bumpy soggy sea creature, right? However, with those sensations were combined now, amplified to a hundred, and coupled with the haunting imagery of Mandy’s face becoming less and less visible, while the abyss of her mouth gradually consumed him. Even with all his willpower and inspired hopes of outlasting the maniac’s games, it was a bit much to handle.
He could hear gurgling from the opening at the back of Mandy’s throat, bubbling sputum and pockets of air fighting to get through. Indeed, while Peter was a small lad by any metric, he wasn’t exactly the size of a gumdrop, either. Five inches of height filled up fast in a standard mouth, even one that opened as wide as Mandy’s while expertly immunized against gagging. This again reassured Peter, as his head finally entered the hole, that it was impractical to “accidentally” eat someone of his size without either first chewing or focusing very hard. Though on the other hand, there was nothing guaranteeing that Mandy, like the lifelong wild card she was, wouldn’t decide that, having evidently won Peter’s soul and devotion, it was best to go out on a high note and just swallow him whole to clean all the evidence away. With a vision of Lisa plastered in his brain, though, Peter elected to believe, against all odds, in the best of outcomes until such time as it became absolutely impossible to do so. Cheeks puffed out to accommodate Peter’s cramped limbs, and his body folded into a tight ball, Mandy put in the effort and slid her lips closed over the boy, where they rested gooily atop his head.
All Peter could see now was dark, but he had to guess that anyone hypothetically looking at Mandy now from outside would see a girl who’d voluntarily shoved an entire jawbreaker inside her foolish mouth. Not only was there nothing but blackness in the claustrophobic hovel, but oxygen became rare in record time. All he had to breathe was the stale, recycled fog from Mandy’s bacterial throat. From every conceivable side, the spit-sludgy flesh jittered, in a constant state of creepily living motion. Those sides squeezed and receded in every geometric combination, nonviolent but still revealing their strength, as though the ruddy interior walls of the girl’s mouth were molding Peter like a piece of clay. Groping, in their own inelegant way. Had the freshman not kept his focus, this would’ve been the ideal and entirely reasonable moment to have a yelping flailing breakdown.
Mandy had kept her word in two respects, though. It was significantly warmer in here than outside, sauna-like, where the heat clung to Peter’s skin and then took liquid form. He couldn’t say where his anxious sweat ended and where Mandy’s greedy spit began, though he was willing to bet the majority of the fluids belonged to the giant girl. As for her other vow to clean him, that rising moat of saliva flowed freely enough that every square micrometer of the boy’s clothes and even body was now acridly sodden through the skin. Was this what it felt like to be pickled? Maybe a comparison to a sardine in a can was more accurate, Peter thought with cool collectedness that surprised even himself.
The walls began undulating. In and out, like a pulsing heart, Mandy clenched then flared her cheeks. This not only generated additional saliva that now pooled so high Peter had to keep his eyes shut tight to avoid it getting in, but created a bizarre suction effect. The small boy’s ears popped like he was on an airplane changing elevation, and those cheeks kept right on billowing. She was sucking on him.
To distract himself from the alien feelings assaulting his body, Peter walked himself through the mental path of fire. She was cleansing him and keeping him warm in her own trademark psychotically twisted manner, yes, but also testing him. Experimenting. A predator with its prey who, for once, was more interested in absorbing the helpless thing’s reaction than just boringly turning the critter into calories. Mandy drew her strength like some ancient crone from the misery and subservience of others, with Peter her most valuable target ever, because she put him in his place so easily. Or at least she used to. The girl hadn’t caught on yet, too drunk on her own evolving power over him, but she owned less of Peter now than she did even on that first day of school, when she’d dunked him in the water bowl. He understood that, and nothing Mandy did now could take it away, even if those super-powered esophageal muscles of hers managed to rip him down to the acidic depths.
Peter would never have pictured himself achieving relative enlightenment while his whole abused body was imprisoned inside the hot, oozy mouth of the school bully who’d just joked about the possibility of eating him alive right after forcing him to commit ownership of his life to her forever. But then again, Peter had never done things the traditional way. Why start now, he wondered?
When Mandy messily pried her jaws apart again after God-knew how long, gasping and spraying pressure-triggered saliva blobs all about while stretching her lips to make the transition easier, Peter too drew renewing breath. He was congealed from head to toe in a layer of viscous digestive fluid that reeked worse than Mandy’s exhalations; his body was sore at a bone-deep level from the cramped conditions of his overnight jar and then the even more confining quarters of his devotional bath; his handmade Tom Thumb costume was so riddled with saliva that the slightest tug would’ve ripped them all away and left him bare in the girl’s clumsy maw. In spite of all that, Peter allowed himself the strangest of indulgences: an autonomous, half-concealed smile of triumph.
Mandy’s fingers wadded in around him and the elastic seal of her pink lips, grasping for purchase, though it was harder now than ever after how thoroughly her suckling had lubed Peter up. After several attempts, however, plus the aid of gravity and writhing cheeks, the girl deposited her alleged prize into both cupped palms. As Peter came out and landed in a sloppy pile, he was followed by a train of her drool, looking very much like he’d just been ejected from a science-fiction birthing pod. Peter and the gunk formed a puddle in the girl’s hands, which she lowered toward the grass and set down at arm’s length in front of her crossed legs. Through the layer of spit gelling into a plasma-like solid across his eyes, Peter spied that same scarce expression on Mandy’s face. She was not only tentatively knocked askew this time, but elevated into another mental stratosphere. Her eyes flitted hazily between the boy she’d just held alive in her mouth, and the stone wall of the bridge underhang, which she seemed to stare right through with a thousand-yard affinity. It seemed to Peter that he wasn’t the only one becoming enlightened, even if Mandy’s turn was entirely based on the con he’d just pulled on her.
The boy lay in the grass, coughing but conscious. Compared to the worries he’d had just last night of remembering his lines and being heard by the audience, this morning was in a different dimension. But he was still here. Which had to count for something.
He sighed, not sure what he’d do next, but gratified to have at least extended his lifespan long enough to keep thinking. Every minute awake and wondering was another minute he hadn’t been snuffed. Then Peter looked above again at Mandy. The dark-haired kook was still heavy-breathing and getting ahold of herself in a soothing yoga pose while lapping her lips and dramatically gulping, likely savoring the last remnants of the five-incher’s funky flavor. More than likely, she was again reflecting on the promise she’d made about his fairy costume while conspicuously indicating to her crotch.
This was slightly alarming to Peter, though not nearly as alarming as the instantaneous light-speed rate his heartbeat reached when he saw none other than Erica, his big sister, standing behind the blissfully serene Mandy. He wasn’t dreaming this time.