For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 9) (Patreon)

For thirty-six hours straight and counting, the longest stretch he’d been deprived of pleasure since his shrinkage, Tony didn’t plop onto one of the house’s many stomping rugs and demand immediate satisfaction. He didn’t avoid Lillian either, not wanting to give her the impression that she’d unnerved him – which the little guy wasn’t even admitting to himself as the truth – but he interacted with her only as much as required to get through his day, conducting himself with brief almost-robotic politeness that she returned in kind. Rather than sticking to his refined forty-minute work schedule, he closed himself off in the home office for hours longer than necessary, staring blankly at the same financial reports and investor profiles onscreen, and occasionally flinching if he heard his wife make a noise somewhere around the house. But it certainly wasn’t a fearful wince. She hadn’t goddamn spooked him yesterday. They’d simply strayed from his new mission statement for their marriage, if only a little, and as the man of the house, Tony knew it was his job to correct it. Perhaps he’d even been out of line himself, he concluded over time, regardless of how he hadn’t exactly told any lies while they artlessly hashed things out in the laundry room. But again, man that he was, he saw it as his duty to forgive the occasional hysterical flareup from a person who surely labored at times under the knowledge that she didn’t have much, if anything, without her husband in her life. Thus, Tony was prepared to be generous here. Especially because, if they could just tweak away the rougher edges of her upgraded technique, the woman really had come so close to delivering the greatest trample session of their whole relationship. All she needed was his help, like always.

“Babe?” Tony uttered, clearing his throat as he shuffled into the living room, where Lillian was watching some serialized TV drama-thriller he didn’t recognize. In effort to begin this exchange with sensitivity, he’d tried to make his voice seem gentler and almost come-hither, but mainly succeeded in a higher-pitched quaver that made him sound on the verge of an apologetic tear-burst, which was the last thing he wanted. So he ably overcompensated with a more-assertive tone while marching toward the couch upon which his wife was throned, still with her gaze glued to the plasma screen: “I think we’ve got some things to talk about, don’t you?”

Taking a lengthy enough moment to acknowledge his presence, such that Tony had to wonder if she’d even heard him at first, Lillian turned down the volume on her show, though didn’t mute it, before looking toward the floor where her six-inch-tall husband was waiting with his arms folded behind his back in the exact spot that the woman’s recently-pedicured feet would be resting if she hadn’t crossed her legs up on the cushions instead. Her expression wasn’t quite as briskly foreign to him as it was yesterday during those eerie seconds after she’d so forcefully treaded Tony on the tile while allowing laundry water to trickle down her toes and splash the shrinker’s cheeks. In fact, there was the subtlest hint of a Mona Lisa smile on those lips now, but neither did her eyes widen or hands demurely fold in anticipation of whatever her spouse desired next.

“Yes. I… think that’s a good idea,” Lillian replied, measured and cool.

Tony paused then, expecting her to dip both hands toward the floor and provide him with an elevator lift up to the sofa, so they could speak on even terms. But she did no such thing, only resting her chin against splayed fingers and contemplatively pursing her lips, forcing the shrinker to crane his neck to meet her sightline. She’d performed this courtesy without fail since his stature reduction, but only now did he really notice that consistency by the sudden absence of it. For an instant Tony considered asking the giantess what the holdup was, before deciding that he was only going to handicap himself before this conversation even kicked off if he had to start by pleading for a boost onto the furniture like some toddler. It didn’t matter, though. She’d still have to listen to him, even if it felt so awry to have her looking down on him like this, outside the designated confines of their underfoot playtimes.

“I… apologize… if you were uncomfortable, or if I let my words be misinterpreted yesterday,” Tony officiously declared, injecting just enough genuine-sounding remorse into his voice that any good lawyer hearing a playback could’ve vouched for him. That was more than reasonable of him. “It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Lillian answered, a little closer to her warm introverted norm.

“Was there anything you wanted to say to me?”

“Yes, there is. I owe you an apology, Tony.”

The little man nodded, while trying not to exude too much smugness. Damn right she did.

“Something occurred to me yesterday, for the first time. After that… talk we had,” Lillian said, drawing deep breath before she continued. Her words were heartfelt, certain, and came without hesitation as she held her tiny husband’s gaze on the floor below. “See, for as long as we’ve been together, and as long as you’ve trusted me to take care of your needs, I realized I’ve never… embraced it all the way you really wanted me to. Not completely. I’ve tried, of course. I always paid attention when you’d tell me what you liked and didn’t like about the way I stepped on you. I learned how to be sensitive to your body, when you’re down there, enjoying yourself, the way you deserve, because you work so hard. But I can tell you’ve always wished I was more… involved. Not just doing everything you told me, but taking some initiative on my own. Letting you feel like I appreciate you by becoming a deeper part of what you love most, so much that I would actually want it myself. You’ve never said that to me, I know. Not out loud. It’s on your mind, though. It always has been. You don’t just want me to play-act the part of the woman stepping all over your body. You want me to become her. And I realize now that, at some level, all your years of asking for me to press my feet down on your face, and now shrinking yourself without telling me, just so that feeling will be more intense… those were just your ways of helping me find my way there myself. To bring us… closer. To make things how they were probably always meant to be, but I was just too close-minded before to see it without your help. But my eyes are opening now. So, for that, Tony… I don’t know if saying “I’m sorry” is enough to cover it, but maybe it’s a start.”

Tony doubted he could’ve felt any more floored than he did right now. It was all he could do to keep from stumbling over or grinning like a clownish idiot. He’d expected an apology for that blitzkrieg mat-less curb-stomp she’d given him yesterday which had turned into a pounding twisting cranium-afflicting affair minus any safety word to end it. What he got instead was a fantastic surprise on par with the initial shock he’d experienced when Lillian pushed him over and mercilessly pinned him to the hard tile, only under far more optimistic circumstances today. Indeed, like she surmised, there’d been many times over the years when Tony had fantasized about an impossible iteration of his wife who, exclusively during their trample sessions, could wholeheartedly embody the sexily tyrannical atmosphere of a colossal foot-goddess who wasn’t just humoring his kinks, but had her ego and power nourished by his belittled submission, and was prepared to do whatever it took to make him bend to her will. All in good fun, of course, without too many bruises afterward.

But unfortunately he’d always had to stuff down that pipe dream, resigned to the fact that Lillian’s natural obedience-necessary domestication would never allow her to “become” his ideal giantess of foot-justice. Yet here she was anyway, having apparently undergone some unlikely awakening after yesterday’s misstep, and come out the other side committed to making herself a better wife. Tony could’ve jumped for joy, if he wasn’t still concerned about his current lowly spot on the ground undermining his authority. Nevertheless, despite yesterday’s irregularities, it had been a long time since the shrinker felt quite so in-love with all of Lillian herself, not just her expensively-maintained bare feet, as he did in this moment.

“Wow. Lil, babe, that’s… that’s… I accept your apology. This is… incredible. Honestly. I don’t even know what to say,” Tony replied, humbler now in tone, and granted her more of a smile. Unconsciously, he repeated the same grateful words he’d spoken that first day after helping the woman reach acceptance of her spouse’s new size: “What would I do without you?”

“Luckily, you’ll never have to find that out, will you?” There was a sly lasciviousness to Lillian’s answer, her voice huskier and dripping with provocation, and that was even before considering the temptingly seductive descent of both the golden-haired titaness’s steeply-arched toe-flexed feet from up on those cushions where she’d been hoarding them from Tony until now.

The six-incher had intended, of course, for the second part of this conversation to entail an honest-but-fair appraisal of her excessive force yesterday, maybe leading into a guided instruction so they could finally learn the exact limits of his shrunken physiology together. But that priority was forgotten or at least silenced in awe while Tony watched both his wife’s soles reaching for him at the same time that the entire giantess was shifting herself forward on the sofa. Some subconscious impetus made him backpedal by one fractional step, and that was all he could manage before Lillian overtook her man again, pushing him flat to the floor in the same motion she used to stand up from the furniture and, from his vantage, appear like she was levitating herself by some ethereal power. Though she was definitely doing anything but floating, because once more, Tony helplessly bore the full burden of her compounding double-arched body mass, spread-eagle and quivering on the hardwood.

“Let’s call this my chance to make up for lost time, sweetie,” Lillian softly announced, already kneading the balls of her feet upon her wholly-overcome husband. “This is what you always wanted, right? I’m just so sorry it took this long to give it to you.”

Maybe the most alarming part for Tony about this situation was his realization that Lillian wasn’t overstating anything. This was what he’d always wanted, or at least he thought it was, but of course up to now he’d relied upon the rose-tinted optimism from his round-the-clock virility, and the seemingly-bulletproof math that if his favorite sensation on Earth was to be walked upon by his wife at six-foot-three, then surely the same activity experienced while many factors shorter, lighter, and more-prone to her talents would be exponentially more euphoric? Heartbreakingly, yesterday’s misunderstanding by the washer-dryer had proven to Tony that there did indeed exist cases where there could be “too much of a good thing,” and now for the second time in a row, he’d apparently failed to clarify his precise needs in time to stop another sexually-flawed debacle. Tonight, she wasn’t just stepping down on him and holding her statuesque position, but rather forcing her shrunken husband to experience every region and every pressure-state of her underfoot islands in a span of chaotic quick-footed seconds.