For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 18) (Patreon)

But that chance didn’t come. Lillian first pivoted in the other direction without fully lifting either foot off the ground, which in itself was a hurtful chore for her slipper passenger to handle. Then after gathering up her romance novel and iced tea, the giantess wordlessly used the same ped currently stomp-pinching her husband into a footprinted oily-discolored slipper insole to push the balcony door the rest of the way open and pass through it with a confident lunge. And just like that, Lillian was walking all over Tony. Literally. Once again, the sensations being pumped into the little man by every heaving lurch forward on their involuntarily shared journey shouldn’t have felt so foreign, given the number of previous scenarios in which he’d been made to absorb repeated slow-blow collisions from his towering partner’s sizable kissably-doughy marble-glossy soles. Yet whether it was on account of a taxing mental barrier about being used as her traveling in-shoe arch support, or some clandestine mastery by Lillian when it came to stepping on her defeated husband with purposefully ever-evolving strength, Tony once again had entered a whole new world of crushingly egregious undersole dolor.

Each airborne arc for the next half of her step left the slipper-incarcerated man in a state of vertiginous limbo, and every floor-greeting tread that punctuated it bluntly refreshed the full severity of implosion-threatening tension. By the time Lillian had taken just twenty paces through the upstairs hall, the six-incher could actually feel his body unifying its compression-based bond with her naked sole far more than the back-dangled purple tongue of the slipper platform. This ensured that his puny face couldn’t even come free enough from her arch during her gait’s many ascents to glimpse any light or gasp up surplus breeze, but remained just as firmly tacked to her skin as when she was actively driving her slipper back into the floor. Nor did his torso every remotely separate from its hatefully adhered spot just above Lillian’s heel, which also prevented his shriveled lungs from ever refilling by more than a split-second trickle of oxygen at a time. Tony’s limbs at least had some chaotic flexibility to spread and flail during those pulse-length rises and falls from the ground, but that liberty was strictly limited to either hugging his arms and legs pencil-straight together, or pushing them out far enough to the sides that he could touch the impenetrable fuzz-wall of slipper lining without hope of clambering out past it. He may as well have been a mistakenly acquired blob of chewed bubble gum caught off the street, made to mildly distend and form gooey new geometries after every step-down, but still never seeming to come unstuck from the enormous overbearing foot which had claimed him.

To believe that this treatment hurt like hell was to overestimate the pain any hell actually had to give. This was the real deal. Tony let out a panged symphony of gurgles and grunts after each cruising smash between his wife’s rigidly putty-quashed sole and her too-thin indoor footwear, projecting more-or-less of the curse-filled vulgarity he longed to furiously pronounce on Lillian’s behalf, but in practice, only successfully communicated those feelings as a muffled series of barely-audible squeaks. Had she even been walking on him for longer than a minute, the shoe-entrenched shrinker wondered in his shadowy aching singularly-cramped haze? He’d attempted to count her steps on him at first, but quickly lost the capacity for such coherent quantifying, as he was far too preoccupied with utterly failing to physically or psychologically surmount the waves of flesh-compounding bone-knotting thrust delivered unto him. What’s more, Lillian wasn’t even strutting heavily enough to disturb the furniture, instead using a natural relatively-easygoing canter that probably wouldn’t draw any curious second looks from anyone who happened to see her in motion. Hypothetical passerby might clock that something was amiss if they happened to look down and see Tony’s disembodied doll-like legs jutted out from below his spouse’s pink-perfect heel, but the little captive wasn’t about to hope for a chance so unlikely as that.

Then in one whirling jolt and a gush of decrepitly-wheezed air, it was over for now, and the shrunken industry-titan was released from his wife’s slipper. The squeezed buffeting of that meandered route around the upstairs hall inside Lillian’s soft shoe was relegated only to a heavily-lingered aftershock sensation thrumming painfully through his every extremity, as the gap between her pillowy insole and creamy stalwart heel widened enough for the six-incher to be pulled out, straight into the giantess’s clawed grasp.

“You’re going to tell me everything,” Lillian informed Tony while seated in his high-priced home office chair, candid as she was cold. Having fished her ruddied cough-happy spouse from the house slipper without even looking down, the woman clenched him in an iron fist while operating the little guy’s work computer with the other hand. “Account numbers and passwords for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, PNC, Citibank, and wherever else you have liquid assets squirreled away, like I know you do. Don’t worry, I know about the hedge funds and stock options, too. We’ll get to those eventually. Just so you know, dear, it’s absolutely okay if you’re having trouble remembering all those pesky numbers. I’ll be just as happy if you can tell me where you wrote them all down instead. But, as smart and paranoid as you can be, something tells me you know them all by heart.”

“W-What… what do you think you’re… fucking goddamn it…” Tony mumbled limply from her hand, still struggling to reach partial cogency again, let alone anything approaching his normal self. Even articulating his lips to speak in comprehensible language took an effort that stung every sole-mushed facial muscle in use, so attempting to writhe out of her clutches would’ve been a non-starter.

“I told you, little one,” Lillian said. “Everything that used to be yours belongs to me now. You don’t have to worry, though. I’m still going to take care of you. Just the way I always have, especially since you most-definitely did the right thing by following your biggest dream of becoming a squishy little foot-loving gnome who fits pretty snugly into my slipper. In fact, from now on, I’m going to be taking care of you so much, you won’t even know what to do with yourself. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. And all you have to do in return is ramble off a few numbers for me. Right now.”

“No… goddamn… way,” the six-incher toxically panted. He even contorted his expression to match his abominable mood, though every individual skin cell and muscle fiber still throbbed after that lawless corpus-abrading three-minute walkabout inside his wife’s slipper. But it was still worth it to him, so she’d see the stormfront rage in his face for herself. The idea of surrendering to these underfoot intimidation tactics, and allowing his wife to take control of the vast financial bounty he’d spent so many years cultivating, was so inconceivably nauseating and existentially repugnant to Tony that he couldn’t think even one instant into the future before providing his heavily-huffed response: “I’m not… telling you… a fucking thing!”

“No? All right, then. That’s fine by me,” his wife replied, just as coolly unperturbed as before. Still without even meeting Tony’s bleary gaze, the titaness tilted her ankle, allowing that lavender slipper to plop to the floor below. Then, reaching atop the desk, Lillian retrieved what appeared to be a random bundle of thatched-together red yarn like a quarter-completed sewing project, which she proceeded to crudely shove over the top half of her spouse’s spent frame. Before Tony even knew what was happening, his wrists and ankles were looped through multi-layered makeshift yarn cuffs joined into the rest of the woolly saddle-like structure. Feebly, he tried to worm his limbs out of these confinements, but without skipping a beat, the giantess thumb-batted his sluggish resistance into quivery-compliant stillness again, then pointed her toes to fit through the sleeve of what the shrinker now realized wasn’t an unfinished sock, but a customized foot harness, made especially to affix him to her sole. One easy tug later, as if to smooth out the wrinkles in fine hosiery, and Lillian was tautly wearing her yarn-stretched husband flush on the underside of her foot. “I’ll just ask you again in, say, three hours.”