For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 21) (Patreon)

Based on his track record these past weeks, following the many sobering dozens of over-the-top painful flattenings he’d received below his spouse’s unerring barefooted gait, Tony should have required an entire day to recuperate after what he’d just suffered. And that was an optimistic estimate. Even two full days of solitude later, he’d probably still be feeling at least a twinge. During the first few seconds, he honestly believed heavy-duty tweezers might be needed to pick and tug at every flesh-deflated part of his ground-down body to help separate compacted tissue layers within, as the binding smothering pressure-pregnant sensations of these last three hours had so thoroughly rolled him into a tighter version of himself. He might as well have been melted from the inside-out. Then those demonically sultry words from Lillian struck Tony’s ears, reminding him of his wife’s insane illegal marriage-shattering assault on everything he was and everything he had built himself up to be over years of intelligence, hard work, and goddamn gumption. And by sheer frenzied outrage, he accelerated his recovery into a span of a few seconds: by no measure anywhere close to normal again, but enough that he could project the correct acrimony from his face and speak without drooling, while the rest of his flaccid form shook in the smiling giantess’s hand like a canned chemical reaction ready to overflow. The halting words came out before he even knew what they’d be, driven by concentrated spitfire:

“I… am never giving… another single… fucking… penny… to a psychotic bitch like you. Do you have… any idea… what you’ve… just done? What… I’m… going to make sure… happens to you… now? You’re… going to pay… for everything… you’ve done… to me. No matter… what it takes… you’re going to feel… everything you made… me feel. And then… you’re going to spend… every fucking day… for the rest of your miserable… worthless… crazy goddamn CUNT life… begging me… to forgive you. But… I… fucking… won’t.”

On some subconscious level, Tony may have comprehended that there would be a consequence of some kind for this less-than-polite answer to his wife’s quiet threats. He may have even comprehended that he might later regret standing by his principles with such raw honesty like this, rather than croaking out whatever cuckolding apologies and password recitations were needed to prevent another three hours of sweaty sweltering existence-squelching trample hell inside her slipper. Yet Tony still couldn’t have lived with himself if he didn’t address Lillian now with every atom of fiery wrath she deserved for coming at him with anything less than weepy genuflecting sorrow, let alone the soft-spoken victory-presumptive smugness he instead noticed in the giantess’s aura. It was unacceptable. And what’s more, no matter what happened next – whatever cost he had to pay in brutal humiliation and scalp-to-heel physiological suffering and questionably survivable near-asphyxiation – the six-incher told himself it would all be worth it, if only he could see the look of defeat on his wife’s face once she realized he couldn’t be broken. Just one crestfallen look. That was all he needed from her.

But it didn’t come. After this bold uncompromising retort from Tony which should have demoralized the bitch’s entire ill-conceived hostile takeover, Lillian’s countenance hardly budged: not to gasp, not to go goggle-eyed, not to roar with impotent fury. Only one eyebrow raised, inquisitive but unsurprised, and then without even parting her lips to speak again, the icily calm giantess guided the red-yarned harness back over her bare foot. Again she moved too quickly for Tony to process that he’d once again lost this exchange, or that she wasn’t in the least bit fazed by his loquacious courage. And regardless of whether or not the six-incher might have seen fit to add a kinder post-script to his previous remarks, his splayed body was already affixed to her sole flesh by the kind of hyper-focused suction that felt like it could’ve kept active modules of a space station interlocked, leaving his regretful mouth mashed into a hearty arch wrinkle, and thus unavailable for comment. That damned slipper swallowed the diminutive CEO and his spouse’s foot in the same world-darkening swoop that Lillian used to rise from the chair, stalking off to parts unknown again. Just like that, the pressurized slowly-rampaging night terror picked up right where it had left off. The full amplified tonnage of prior crushing silky-soled ardor came roaring right back as though it had never left at all, and might not ever leave again.

Was this what it felt like to exist for eternity in the final moment just before drowning, Tony wondered, but without ever crossing the threshold? Like a living snapshot of that hypothetical instant, when all oxygen and lifeforce and will to exist had been drained dry by his own wife’s ruthless burden-rich undersole smushing, and he should have been just one empty gasp away from expiring while surrounded by miles of sea above him. There was a weight upon the little guy that likely rivaled the deathly eardrum-exploding gravity-supercharged underwater depths of Deep 6, so the expectation to drown felt even more apt here than if he’d literally been submerged in a bathtub and held down there until he’d passed.

But despite how much his body seemed to have no choice except to surrender to that lethal urge again and again, and even when a part of Tony’s trounce-deformed psyche may have actually wished to fade into the blackness, if only it would spare him further self-crunching grief beneath Lillian’s perfectly tortuous soles, it didn’t happen. His throat let out a silent rattle while his lips were still plugged against doughy decadent arch wrinkles, with no air passing in or out of his systems, and still he remained awake and alive, or at least in some unwanted version of such states. It was the psychological equivalent of trying to walk down steps in pitch-darkness, sticking one’s leg out into the void, and then feeling no slatted surface there ready to catch him, yet not being allowed to tumble down the stairwell – even while he tipped his body forward into the anticipated fall.

God, why couldn’t he just fall already, Tony wondered at the absolute depth of his soul-spiraling despair below her foot? Why wouldn’t she let him go?