For Richer, For Smaller (Chapter 25) (Patreon)

Now, an hours-long period of being smothered, sweated, and outright thrashed by those pliant blessedly-smooth feet didn’t push Tony to the edge of literal madness while flooding his every contused skin cell with alarm-belled nerve-fried agony; it merely caused anguish at a lower-order of magnitude where, past all the flesh-thinning and lung-squishing treatment, he could sometimes actually feel the fleeting pleasure burst of his essentially-guaranteed orgasm whenever it finally happened. Which at least was a minute silver lining in an otherwise black-and-thunderous sky of inescapable storm clouds.

Regrettably, though, whatever temporary thankfulness he could’ve derived from that learned enhancement, allowing his half-foot body to steel itself against the more suicidally-awful aspects of getting viscerally flattened by his gargantuan wife as faithfully as a new day dawned, were accounted for over time and slowly cancelled out by Lillian. When he stopped passing out after only a few hours in-shoe at a time, she obviously noticed, and began instead keeping him cooped inside for whole mornings, afternoons, or sometimes long enough that Tony never saw the sun in between. And so the occasional hurt-riddled unconscious spells returned, along with the equally-painful conscious ones. When her husband’s body apparently become sufficiently accustomed to a beatdown from the average walkabout beneath her such that he ceased collecting bruises or animalistically writhing in the way he used to, she started shaking up the formula. Sometimes Lillian unexpectedly tiptoed about like a ballerina without letting her heels touch the ground. Or shuffled heavily forth, never lifting her shoe treads from the floor. Or she just compressed down all the force of her monolithic figure with surgical precision through the balls of her feet, the brawny ampleness of which was so often the bane of Tony’s existence in particular when that rounded underfoot anatomy seemed so hellbent on irreparably denting in his chest with its shape, like so many used-and-discarded running shoe insoles too crippled to offer support any longer.

Today, the giantess was employing all those tricks and more. Having first worn Tony around the house for six hours straight in her slippers from the instant they both awoke, without a word of explanation – per usual – Lillian was now on her way somewhere important with him, offering no reprieve in between, and practically inventing a secretive dance along the way by nature of her ever-shifting bearing and confident heel-stabbing momentum. She’d purposefully chosen to place him under the foot which worked the car’s gas pedal, abruptly screeching to a halt at every red light and then burning rubber from zero-to-sixty in less time than it took Tony to simultaneously groan from deep in his jellied innards and reach another fidgety barely-ecstatic cum against her cumbersome arch.

Even as delirious as he was down here, the shrunken former CEO had an intuition about where they were headed, based on the familiar length of the car ride before Lillian continued stamping him en route to her goal again, and the way she’d recently been going whole days without asking him any clerical questions about running the business. Like she’d taunted before, it was like she truly didn’t need his mind anymore. Such news would’ve once been welcome to Tony, who for a long while felt a gout of marrow-deep resentment every time he had no choice but to volunteer whatever information would make it even easier for Lillian to steal his life’s work; now, he found he would’ve given almost anything to be consulted that way again, if only as a reminder that he was still good for something in this world besides serving as a quashable humanoid pin cushion below his wife’s dominant treading.

And now – he knew without having to see it for himself – she’d brought him back to the same place he’d built up by the sweat of his own brow and proudly cold-blooded enterprise. The place which he’d misguidedly used as his personal instrument to fulfill all his macrophilic wet dreams-turned-nightmares. The place she’d taken away from him, along with everything else good in his life from dollars to desires, and which she now had seen fit to rub in his face for who-the-hell-knew what purpose except insatiable hubby-splatting sadism.

Tony could hear chattering voices too muffled and high above to parse out, and the vibratory footsteps of other giant beings closer to his little earthbound world cramped inside Lillian’s shoe. He knew that chorus well: the bustling activity of the hundreds and thousands of people he once viewed as his useful yet ultimately lesser and disposable underlings, but who now were just a distant race of superhuman titans that, no matter how low on the corporate totem pole they sat, had become infinitely more significant than their former leader, from upper management on down to the night janitors. In those glorious first days after his shrinkage, Tony still thought of them all in that same way, even while splayed supine on the kitchen floor and concealed from the rest of the world by his pampered wife’s once-reluctantly applied soles, extracting the grandest euphoria of his life while coaching her to step down on him harder. Then indeed Lillian did just that, had never stopped, and everything took a turn. What would they all think to see him in here now, he wondered with hollowing dread? Would they even think anything at all? Surely someone would save him, if they caught a glimpse of his naked frame sweatily mashed on the footprinted insole like a run-over frog on highway blacktop, even if it took them a minute to mentally register him as a human being again, and then this fantasy-poisoned ordeal might at last end. But once the story of his discovery got out, and the fact that he’d basically sealed his own lifetime-shrunken fate by willfully making himself into Lillian’s slave, would anyone be able to look at him the same ever again? Could Tony ever look at himself again?

The giantess marched through the palatial maze-like halls of the corporation headquarters. She showed special favoritism for grinding her packed-in six-incher down with toe-flexing arch-emphasizing plows from the ball of her foot, which made every stride feel to Tony like this next impact might finally be the critical landing when a bowl-shaped depression would be fatally carved into his crunchy newly-concave torso by the beautiful geometry of his wife’s toned clay-fleshed ped. Most depressing of all, such disfigurement probably wouldn’t even finish him off for good – sexually, yes, but not mortally. After a toe-tapping ride up the elevator to what Tony guessed was the executive floor where he once reigned supreme, Lillian moved both forward and upon him with a crushing vengeance. A few swinging doors and hushed whispers later, she arrived wherever she’d been headed all along. Only by vague muscle memory could the stingingly-leveled shrinker deduce that she was not only standing in the executive conference room now, of all places, but at the head of the long table, where he used to determine fortunes and destroy dreams like a bored king overlooking a gladiatorial arena.

What did she hope to accomplish by coming here, Tony furiously considered? The fact that Lillian had been made his work-from-home proxy for the past weeks was technically known to the company’s higher-ups, as it became impossible to hide at a certain point once she started claiming all his responsibility and cachet for herself. But she must have been a figurehead, at best, in their minds, since the only version of this woman they’d ever known was the one who used to stand quietly but glamorously done-up on the sidelines at lavish company functions, while Tony commanded the room. If she was really doing what he thought she was doing, just nonchalantly barging in here for an in-person mutiny in front of the powerful people she supposedly planned to oversee, she was going to get laughed out of the room so disastrously that the disgrace of it would probably eclipse them both, considering his own utter failure to control her. Tony’s chief concern right now was still awaiting an opportunity to cry out for help from any giant passing subordinates, however slim that chance while his spouse had her shoe fully donned, but in a close-second was his panicked yearning to stop her from playing Little Miss CEO right now and thus soiling whatever remained of his reputation. His scrunched-down body might be too late to truly save now, tromped and deflated and taught to feel constant blistering malady through every exiguous skin cell that was corpulently suppressed beneath her foot, but he’d be damned if Lillian was going to ruin the idea of him too.