Happy Birthday Blues (Chapter 5) (Patreon)

“Ya sure that shoe’s going to fit, Steph?” Alexis said, trying to be polite but also doing little to hide her disdainful lip-curl at the poor fit. “The heel might, you know… break.”

“Heels are uncomfortable as shit, anyway,” Jessica dryly butted in.

“Hey, we definitely agree on that!” Tara laughed.

“Oh, c’mon, Stephanie, it’s okay. We’ll find you a pair that fits better,” Molly encouraged. “Although, those almost fit. How do they feel?”

“No, no… it’s fine. I’d look silly in them, anyway,” Stephanie sighed with disappointment, and proceeded to pry the shoe off using the chubby bare toes of her other cream-white foot.

To Ted, this simple act meant pandemonium, as he still stranded unseen on the floor between the thick hourglass-silhouetted redhead’s peds, one sole thickly padded by summer-dampened flesh and the other stuffed into a shoe almost to the point of bursting the glossy sides and indeed snapping the heel like Alexis warned. Ducking just in time to avoid being kicked by the battering-ram momentum of Stephanie’s chunky toe-tips swinging unknowingly at him, he scrambled ahead once the heated mass of her foot passed just an inch over his body, sprinting onward across the dangerous terrain below the shoe-trying party. The ground still tremored while the gentle-hearted giantess fought to squeeze her foot back out of the taut high-heeled cusp, and when she finally succeeded, letting the shoe be kicked into the coffee table before trouncing her flushed sole back to the floor, Ted was launched into the air again, only able to close his eyes and cover his head for landing.

The return to solid ground for the crumb-sized brother was rougher this time, and not couched by carpet fibers, but instead something firmer, emanating balmy heat and, more troublingly, an unmistakable sour musk of grit and grime, with just a hint of some overseas spice Ted couldn’t name. Opening his eyes again, though he already knew exactly where he’d landed, the little guy found himself stranded upon sloped terrain, smooth and light-mocha-hued, yet still dusted with chalk and shining in spots with dried sweat. He’d landed right on top of Tara’s bare foot, and though he’d only ever viewed her as the “petite” athlete, strong but scrappy, the Cambodian-American giantess seemed nothing less than a mythological warrior goddess now.

“Hey, nobody told me we had some actual good shoes to pick from!” Tara crowed suddenly, holding up the blue-green outdoorsy keen shoes Ted had purchased. From below, her secret foot-rider could spot the deep trenches of the black rubber treads, trying to comfort himself with the fact that he could fit between the grooves if he was about to be stepped on, then immediately remembered just how hard Tara strode despite her stature.

“Ew, you wouldlike those, wouldn’t you?” Alexis teased.

“They match your eyes, Tara!” Stephanie said.

“Whatever floats your boat, just so long as I don’t have to try them,” Jessica shrugged.

“Give them a try! They’ll look badass on you,” Molly said, nodding to Tara.

“Way ahead of you,” the dark-haired rock-climber laughed, and threw both shoes down to the ground with a thud. The force, even from a distance, caused Ted to slide down the tepid incline of her foot flesh, nearer to her beady yet exercise-callused toes. Though it made his stomach churn to imagine once again having to wrestle smelly digits ten times his size at least, Ted also knew there was about to be some seismic chaos right below him, as the girl prepared to shove her foot into her preferred shoe. Thankfully, her opposite foot went first, giving Ted time to scramble along the shallow caramel-colored skin terrain toward her toes, where he might at least manage to hang on.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched that immense opposite ped rammed into the aquamarine keen, her burly toes clenching the straps and tugging them at bizarre angles while slipping the shoe on and off, letting her naked sole with chalk-granules still painted in the arch creases massage across the back-end of the new accessory. Then with one more thwomp, it was in, and the next went much quicker. By then, Ted had just managed to burrow himself “safely” between Tara’s two smallest toes, as it was the only place which would be able to hold him tightly enough for the upcoming swoop.

Surrounded by tightly conditioned flesh, feeling pulsating musculature even in her pinky while it unknowingly embraced him, the miniscule fellow was overcome at first by the heady odor of dirt and slime from her workout, but didn’t have long to concern himself with nausea before vertigo set in too, when the giantess bobbed her foot high into the air at breakneck speed. Just as she performed every action in her life, Tara tried on the shoe decisively and forcefully, thrusting her elegant yet dirty deep-tan foot at a downward angle toward the teal straps.

Everything happened so fast, as Tara’s foot filled up the keen, that Ted barely had time to notice himself coming loose from the brawny hold of her toes. When her ped jolted to a halt at the front of the strappy teal outdoorwear, the unseen passenger was shot like a bullet from betwixt those musty, sweat-globbed digits, and very nearly fell out the other side of the shoe, but managed to break his fall by again grabbing the black rubbery edge of the insole at the last instant, now dangled from the front of a shoe instead of the back.

The floor was close, and Ted was an instant from releasing his hold, only to instead find himself rocketing toward the sky again, though in reality Tara was only lifting both feet to prop them up on the coffee table. This left the little man hanging from the top of a deathly tower of hard rubber tread, one jostle from being plunked to a concussive conclusion on the table, or worse, a return journey to the ground, except now with him perched helplessly under the raven-haired jock-girl’s shoe, and she wasn’t likely to start tip-toing at this point in life. He yelped in panic and for rescue, but knew he was clinging too far from the upper crest of the shoe to be seen by anyone, even though Tara’s friends were still vocally admiring the titanic athlete’s choice. All Ted could do now was gaze down at the gut-flipping drop to the table, as well as across the expanse of the circle to the other absentminded ladies blissfully unaware of his suffering, praying for a miracle.

And that’s when Ted heard the approaching thunder of his mother’s footsteps, as well as the first singsong notes of the Happy Birthday song, which everyone but his bashful sister soon joined. Chancing a peek over his shoulder to the loft staircase, he saw Isabel coming with the candlelit cake: a moist chocolate construction with strawberry frosting five layers deep, Molly’s favorite. Even from a distance, though, the sugary structure looked like a pink-glazed coliseum to Ted, and by the time his giant mother had set it down in the center of the coffee table, it appeared even more imposing. Though the completion of the song should’ve been his opportunity to scream and finally catch someone’s attention with Isabel so close and all eyes hungrily locked to the dessert, both Tara’s feet then tipped forward so she could lean in to view the cake too, causing her shoe’s tiny hitchhiker to be hidden in shadowy overhang, and just one careless slump away from being powderized under her sole more easily than a piece of climbing chalk.

“Oh, come on, Mom. We barely got started with the shoe try-ons that Teddy put together for me! Is it really cake time?” Molly laughed, sighing with guilt. “Seriously, where ishe? I need to give him a big sloppy kiss on his goofy face for all he did for me.”

Ted took this chance to cry “HERE!” but predictably, no sky-scraping women flinched.

“I know, but I thought you girls should tuck in while it’s still warm,” Isabel said, affectionately pinching her daughter’s cheek. She produced plates and utensils, which were passed around the circle, before taking a slicer to the cake.

“Fantastic. I really worked up an appetite on the wall earlier,” Tara announced, and even from this distance, Ted could hear her toned abdomen grumbling. “I’m telling you, I could eat this whole thing myself.”

“It does look scrumptious!” Stephanie said, licking her lips and patting her belly.

“Only a couple bites for me, thanks. I’m watching my weight,” the Barbie-like Alexis crooned, massaging her ultra-thin hips.

“I guess I’ll have a little,” Jessica droned, then added under her breath: “Watching weight is just what the system wants us to do.”

“I know you’re not supposed to say your wish out loud, but whatever: I wish Ted was here so I could thank him for being such a weirdly nice little brother,” Molly stated, receiving a glut of awws and joking groans from her friends. Taking a deep breath, she pursed her lips and blew out the candles with enough of a gale that, if that same spew was exerted on her shrunken sibling instead, he would’ve flown halfway across the room with the brutality of a tornado.

Then Ted watched his mother carving up the delicious cake, witnessing huge walls of crumbly brown baked-goodness colliding with plates, and dollops of pink icing plopping off the knife with enough force to smother him inside its saccharine folds. It was like watching a mountain be pried apart by bare hands and sharp tools. One by one the slices were handed out to the girls, starting with Molly and ending with Tara.

Though he dug his arms and legs against the underside of the ginormous athlete’s shoe treads in preparation, Ted knew he couldn’t hold on forever, and sure enough, as Isabel reached across the table to hand Tara a generous piece, the girl swung both feet off the coffee table, at last trebucheting her tiny toe-dweller off the perch of her shoe, and toward the oncoming plate. High over the table, the mini-man hurtled for what he thought had to be the final time, yet against all odds, his flight was short, ending with a squishy landing into the frothy pink coating of the cake slice.

While he was spared the pain of a hard impact, Ted was immediately glued into the strawberry-scented miasma of the frosting, and only with serious fortitude managed to peel himself out of the glaze, which stuck to him worse than spider webs, only in thick globules that soon coated his entire body, disguising him as the color of the cake. All the while, the plate was passed through the air, shuddering when Tara took hold of it.

Wiping icing from his eyes and stepping around a boulder-like chocolate crumb, Ted looked fearfully above, to find Tara gazing with almost-lustful appetite down on the cake, but still without her pupils latching onto him. She melodramatically slaked her tongue from one corner of her lips to the other, glossing them with saliva. When she did it again, a fleck of spit plunged from her mouth, landing a hairsbreadth away from Ted on the plate. Her huge hand rose into view, with the fork’s deadly tines pointed at the pastry like a sea-god’s trident, and only then did the unfortunate shrinker begin dashing for his life.

Rounding the bend of the cake wedge, Ted looked over his shoulder and saw a fluffy hunk of the wall literally ripped out of place like a bomb had gone off, when in fact it was just Tara’s fork shredding aggressively through. Taking a massive bite, one which so easily could’ve contained Molly’s brother if he hadn’t unstuck himself from the goo fast enough, Tara scooped the morsel up toward her lips and, with the attention of her friends, made a show of animalistically wolfing through the stuff. Though it was meant to be funny, earning laughter and gross-outs from the other girls, Ted was watching a living monument gruesomely masticate a piece of cake large enough to squash him on its own. Pink frosting smeared across her lips, only to be quickly slurped up, while the crumbs themselves were haphazardly sprayed, some getting stuck between her teeth and tumbling into the blackness of her maw, while the rested were rained back toward the plate.