I once dated a guy who got growing pains after sex. And no, not in his dick. Why is that everyone’s first question? I met him at a friend’s birthday party—one of those loose affairs at a bar. I hated parties. I always worried I wouldn’t find anyone to talk to, or if I did, I worried I’d be stuck talking to them all night. Then I met this guy—and he was really very good at parties. Maybe that’s when I should have run. He moved around the bar as easy as if he were swimming. He talked to everyone. He bought rounds and had rounds bought for him. He was tall and you could tell he was one of those people who tanned easily. It was the first time I hadn’t hated someone for it.
I was waiting at the bar for fifteen minutes, just trying to get the bartender’s attention, when he noticed me. His name was Guy, which seemed too right, but also caused a bloom of warmth in my corduroy pants. When I asked where he was staying, hoping it was with our mutual friend the birthday boy so I could follow him to the after party, he said his work moved him around so he was couch surfing. I had never taken anyone home the first night I met them, but it seemed like an experience I could have and after all wasn’t the universe offering me the chance right now with this ideal specimen? My head did reach the top of his chest in a way I knew would fit so well in bed. I could feel it already—how my small size, and I usually hated feeling small—would fit neatly against his frame. That long torso, those ropey arms and legs, those button-downs I could pop open with my teeth. What would that be like? I’d never even kissed someone taller than myself.
And so I took him home. Him, his tall body, the act of a one night stand, it was all a novelty. I was jittery with excitement on the ride home. But when I opened the door to my apartment, I realized the keys were shaking in my hand. I looked around my one bedroom and saw that these were solitary rooms. I felt the reproach from the couch, the thrifted stereo system, the Trader Joes house plants. I had worn them like my skin for years and they didn’t take kindly to visitors.
As if he sensed it, he moved to the stereo and fingered the dials. “Let’s dance,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m serious. I want you to play me a song. Any song in the world, you pick it and let’s dance.”
Should I be reassured that he was putting me at ease or terrified at how good he was at it? I turned on a lamp and walked to the stereo. One song that could communicate my many conflicted feelings right now? I flipped on the FM radio instead and said, “This one.” Thankfully it wasn’t a commercial. It was some new indie pop song that was really having its moment.
Guy grabbed my wrist and spun me into a tight hold. We swished back and forth, and I laughed to convince myself and him that I was having a good time. Then he dipped me back and my back arched in a way that popped something and then I really was having a good time. It can happen that quickly. The song was loud and fast and it felt like the singer was pressed up against my ear and I loved it. He was singing about animals and biting hearts and—
“Shit! Did you just bite me?” I yelped.
He swung me upright and a smile sliced across his face like a knife parting room temperature butter. “Maybe. You picked the song.”
I had. And I had picked him.
We didn’t get up to anything out of the ordinary in bed—exemplary, if not expected sex. He had a short but strong foreplay game, then a few, key positions taken at brisk pace. It was easy in a way I had always hoped sex would be like. Animalistic in the true sense of the word. It was a good night, then we had a good day, and then before I knew it he was staying at my place all of the time. He was in-between work contracts and besides, I liked how he looked on my thrifted, petite couch—he made it vintage. I had always been embarrassed of my threadbare, cobbled together furnishings. But now, where I had once looked and seen hand-me-down, he made it all glow chosen.
***
At first I thought Guy wasn’t into cuddling after sex, which was fine by me. I headed straight to the kitchen for a popsicle and he headed right to the shower. One of those clean types. Better than the alternative. In the two week’s we’d been dating, he’d delivered on each promise his easy charm at the party had promised. He fell asleep quickly and woke up just as fast. He befriended my most judgmental friends and parents. He flirted with babies and old people. His next job contract hadn’t come yet and it was the holidays, so why shouldn’t he use my apartment as a home base as he called it. Home base like in tag. Home base like in baseball. Home base—something your run towards as fast as you run away.
One day I decided to join him in a post-fuck shower. I pulled back the curtain to find him sitting down with his legs stretched out. He was jiggling them in place and had a pained look on his face.
“You alright?”
His face got even redder than the hot water had made it. He scrambled up, slipped, and fell on his ass with a hard, wet splat.
Not proud to say that I laughed.
He was silent. After turning off the water and pulling a towel from the back of the door, he sat down on the edge of the tub. His legs were still shaking. That’s when he told me about the growing pains.
“You remember getting those as a kid, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, as a kid…”
“Well, after we umm—”
“Fuck?”
“After we fuck, I’ve—I’ve been getting these growing pains. Sometimes they’re in my legs, my arms. Last week after we did it in the kitchen—we were making pasta—”
“I was there. Keep going.”
“Afterward you got a head start on the tiramisu, and I got growing pains in my ears.”
“In your ears? Are you fucking with me? How do you know this isn’t something else?”
“I went to the doctor. Nothing. I told him all about it, he examined me, and he said it did present like growing pains, not that that makes any sense for a thirty-year-old man. I’m perfectly healthy.”
He looked little-kid sad. Dropped-ice-cream-cone kind of sad. Before he could get to kicked-puppy sad, I decided to believe him. I mean, why not? The sex was good and he didn’t seem to have a motive for lying, so I leaned into it.
I pulled out a drugstore sewing kit and unspooled the measuring tape.
That day we measured almost every inch of him: Legs, feet, toes, arms, hands, fingers, torso, ears, nose, lips, the whole shebang. I’ll admit it was fun to take stock of my boyfriend’s entire body. It was still a new country to me. I had taken so many different inventories of my own body over the years, it was refreshing to do the same to his, to quantify his form as inches and centimeters and feet. Numbers in the margin of a grocery circular.
This became our routine after sex, our new hobby. Guy got us matching pocket notebooks and his own measuring tape. We hadn’t been exclusive, but when Guy said he hadn’t had growing pains with anyone else, we decided to stop seeing other people. I had only been talking to a few folks, and though it was just flirtatious talk, I had enjoyed having it for my own. But this was new, this was rare I told myself. Maybe this was a sign of where I was meant to be. I was helping him grow, literally.
I should have run when he referred to us going exclusive as eliminating variables in the study. That was the first time he referred to our new hobby as a study. A study of which I was an integral factor. Why didn’t I run? Cause Guy was growing. It was strange, sick, and fascinating. It was slight at first, but when we amped up our getting-it-on frequency, the growth was there in black and white. Two inches became five. Four centimeters became six. And what if there was something magical about me that was causing it? I had to know what I was capable of.
***
Fucking and measuring; We did this instead of parties now. Guy’s easy way of talking to old friends and strangers, his drinking (casual beers followed by casual mixed drinks followed by casual shots), his height and all of those lovely button downs—I had assumed it was all because he was good at parties. But the group of people he held court for could just be one, or just be himself. He drank just as easily at my apartment as the bar, at 3pm as at 8, in sweat pants farting against my tasseled throw pillows as against stainless steel bar stools. I didn’t like parties anyway so this was really better I told myself. And he could be drilling in Alaska next week and wouldn’t I miss him then?
I was missing something—the only thing we weren’t recording; Me. I had always considered myself a moderately vain person, no better or worse than the next, but in all of that time, I never once measured myself. I recorded sex positions, the number of his orgasms, length of time till he finished, and then finally, the measurements of his body and the quality and location of the pains. That was it. I was an anonymous and neglected variable. I decided not to mention this when I first realized it. I was curious when it would occur to Guy. I feared it already had.
The day I decided to say something about my role in all of this, I surprised him at my apartment with my body’s weight in Chinese take-out. My appetite had been through the roof lately, and thankfully so had my metabolism because I couldn’t see an extra inch anywhere. I suspected I was actually losing weight. My clothes were roomier by the day.
Guy kissed me at the door and picked up the bags. A bag with four two-liter soda bottles hung loosely from my wrist. “Thirsty much? This is a shit ton of food. God, this bag is cutting into my hand. How did you carry all of this?”
I closed the door and swung my arm up to take the bags from him. I braced correctly for the weight but the handle flew off my fingers and the food crashed to the floor. I assumed the handle had simply been stretched too large. It was either that or my hand had shrunk.
He dropped to his knees and picked up the scattered bits of sweet and sour chicken and Lo Mein bleeding onto the rug while I stood frozen, studying my hand. Nothing about it seemed odd, but when I held up my left hand the right looked noticeably smaller.
“Look at this,” I said.
“Little busy here,” he said still tossing rogue pieces of orange chicken into a carton splattered with pink pineapple sauce.
“One of my hands is smaller than the other,” I said in a shaky voice I had no power to steady. I flexed both hands. Despite its size, my right hand felt strong, really strong.
He glanced at me as he made his way to the counter with the sticky bags. “And that’s my favorite blow job hand too.”
“Ha-ha,” I said and slung the unbroken bag onto the counter. “At least I have back up, right?”
I pushed the shrunken hand to the back of my mind for the evening. That is until Guy found me in the kitchen at midnight eating a grape popsicle. He had the notebook in his hand and the measuring tape hanging around his neck. His rather large neck. We had been recording, and sleeping together, for six months now and he was noticeably bigger all over. His head, his neck, the length of his arms and legs, the thickness of his biceps and thighs. Guy wasn’t growing in just muscle, or fat, he was just more—him.
“Can you believe we almost forgot?” he said holding out the tape and notebook.
I set down the popsicle in the sink and let it melt. It took about thirty minutes to measure him head to foot. When we were done he kissed me on the cheek, filled a glass of water, and headed off to bed.
By the time I unwrapped a new popsicle, I could hear him snoring.
That was the first time I measured myself. I grabbed a torn envelope from the recycling and jotted down the numbers.
***
Guy was living at my place all the time now and so he wanted to have sex all the time. I wasn’t exactly complaining. It was good sex. It was my only source of exercise. And it was becoming the whole of my free time. I was often late for work, which isn’t easy to hide when you’re a nanny. Dirty nappies don’t wait for thirsty boyfriends. I cancelled plans last minute, if I even texted at all. But what worried me the most was how often I had to safety pin my clothes to keep them up, or wear three pair of socks so my sneakers would fit.
I continued to shrink. I continued to measure in secret.
I don’t know why I waited until his numbers were tucked away in his notebook and Guy was tucked away in bed. Why I locked the bathroom door and measured every part of myself to the glow of the nightlight of the plug-in air freshener. Why I kept it all hushed away in a notebook zipped in the change compartment of my satchel. But I did. If he noticed, Guy never said anything about my size, or my new found strength.
I’d never been to the gym in my apartment building. Honestly, I didn’t know it even existed. But there it was one day when the elevator was broken, and someone had spilt a pot of potato soup on the stairs, and I was forced to take the back stairs. I slipped in and decided to do a few tests with the weights. According to a quick internet search, I could lift three times the recommended weight for my size. Nothing to panic about. I was just strong. I was a Kelly Clarkson song.
Two days later, I could lift ten times that. I tested my strength any chance I got. At best it was a miracle, I was becoming that snowflake my mother always said I was. And at worst, it was a happy distraction from how small I was becoming. I would be that snowflake my mother always said I was.
The sex continued to decrease in nuance and increase in frequency. Guy cancelled any plans he had when I wasn’t nannying to maximize our time between the sheets. I thought about seeing him less, taking a break or calling it off completely, but where his growing numbers had sucked me into this relationship, my shrinking size and burgeoning strength kept me opening the door.
He was so tall now he had to duck through most doorways and wore giant basketball shoes that looked like they belonged to a clown. I could fit my arm, hand to elbow, inside of one. He was clumsy and often jamming his feet or his head against furniture and walls. I couldn’t reach the shelves of the top cabinets or my mailbox in the lobby. How could we possibly breakup when we had become so complimentary?
“Hey, my buddy might have a job for me here in the city,” Guy said one night, going so far as to pause Game of Thrones. “I won’t have to move after all. That’s a relief for you, right?” He reached over and patted my head. His hand lingered for a moment, drifting down my hair as if he was petting a rich coat of fur. He pressed play on the remote but still ran his hand down my hair in an absent minded way. I was about the size a Golden Retriever at this point. I thought about barking or licking his hand. I didn’t. His sense of humor wasn’t what it used to be. It was the only thing about him that wasn’t getting bigger.
“You don’t need me anymore?” I said in a voice a little nasally, a little too unrecognizable as my own.
He barked out a single “Ha” and kneaded my side with his elbow. He pulled me into a tight hug and kissed me hard on the cheek. Well, cheek and ear. His lips were ginormous.
I pulled my legs onto the couch against my chest. My body fit neatly inside the rectangle of the sofa cushion. His body took up two and a half cushions, three if his knees were hung open to the sides, which they were now.
“Sorry if that hurt,” he said. “I’m just so big these days, makes you look so tiny. My little teacup, gimme a splash.”
I knee-jerk laughed in response and kissed him before rolling back onto my quarter of the couch. When Guy shifted his weight, I rode the shift like a current.
Hurt me? It was funny. I was truly laughing. I was small, and not just in comparison to him, but to who I used to be. Small yes, but I had never been stronger. I doubted many people were as strong as I was now. I could open a metal can with two fingers. I lifted the back of my car ten inches off the ground last week. I stacked the three children I nannied on my shoulders, one on top of the other, like we were training for the circus. That is until my fingers got too small to grip the can well, my hands two small to hold the car bumper, my shoulders too narrow for the six-year-old’s hips.
I became the toughest thing you couldn’t see.
***
It would have been easy to ghost. I could slide out a window cracked open for fresh air. I could hide behind almost any piece of furniture, newsstand, bus stop sign, any person on the street. I could lay on the floor and hold a couch over myself, let it hover high enough to not squish my nose. It would still appear to be flat on the ground.
When the hand-me-down clothes I’d accepted from my nanny family got too loose, I decided I had to end it. But I didn’t know what would happen if I left. Would Guy come back down to his natural size? Would I grow back up to mine? Or would I get smaller and stronger until I was like an ant, an atom. Would I eventually disappear?
I was not worried if my strength would leave me or eventually weigh me down to the center of the earth. I didn’t know if the growing pains were a part of me, him, or our union. I didn’t know if they were an infliction or a blessing. So I can’t say I planned to end it when I did. Sometimes I do say I meant to end the relationship then, when a girlfriend or aunt makes a horrified face. But if I am being honest with myself, I don’t think I would have. I don’t know how long I would have gone on with him. I don’t know how small I would have gotten.
I’d come home late. It took me three times longer than usual to get the kids to bed. They were all so much bigger than me now. It’s already impossible to get a three-year-old out of the tub (harder even than getting them in), but when you can’t reach the towels and the baby is screaming because you had to put him in the crib and the six-year-old is throwing things down the stairs—like the clean towels—it’s really impossible. I was exhausted, not in my body but my mind. It was becoming clear I would have to get another job.
I was relieved to find when I walked in that Guy had made dinner. I saw the remains of the cooking process spread violently across the kitchen counters. No matter, I thought, it’s still a home-cooked meal. The apartment was quiet and I didn’t see Guy until the light flickering off his phone caught my eye. He was stretched across my mattress, which had been pulled off the bed frame and dragged into the living room.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He answered when I turned on the overhead light. “Warning much?” He said into his phone screen.
“I asked—never mind. Something wrong with the bed?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m too big for the couch so I pulled the mattress in here.” Before I could say anything he pulled me down onto it with him.
My purse and all of its treasured holdings—four chapsticks, cough drops, phone, wallet, a parking ticket, and the sole hair band I’d been holding onto for a week—went flying under the now defunct couch.
He buried his large face into my neck and pulled my dress off with one easy pull.
“Can I get a bite to eat first?”
“Lasagna. Left you a piece. It’ll taste better afterwards,” he mumbled into my loose hair as he pulled it.
“Ah, shit,” I said and winced, wishing I still had my old arms so I could reach that hairband. “Wait—did you eat the whole thing?”
He didn’t answer. He kneeled and reached for the light switch. Even kneeling erect like that, he was still taller than me. Once he had the light off again, he fell onto me like an ocean wave. We crashed against the mattress and I flew back into the pillows he had lined up against the wall. I closed my eyes and listened to him fuss with undoing our clothes. The soft rustle of fabric sounded like a tide gathering force.
I kept my eyes closed and imagined I was a seashell. A small, hard thing that wound and wound upon itself until its heart was a buried spiral point. My mind was so focused on seeing each line and the exact violet hue of the shell, that I didn’t feel when he entered me. He thrusted again and I realized that he hadn’t. He had only gotten himself between my thighs, which were so strong now I could grip him even tighter than my vagina could. With each hump, the pillows underneath me pushed up and up until I was catching tassels in my mouth. I thought about telling him. I thought about laughing and then telling him he wasn’t even inside me. I thought about doing nothing and just letting him finish that way—against velvet throw pillows instead of inside me.
Guy moaned loudly. I could tell he was nowhere near done, but just impressed with his own stamina. Yet I felt his groan in each of my steel-like and stunted bones. He slapped me hard on the ass and I shot off the mattress and behind the TV console before I even felt the sting. Now I was ready to laugh, or scream, or something. But when I disentangled myself from the cords, I saw that he was still there on the mattress thrusting. I watched him fuck me for what felt like hours but was probably just minutes.
The apartment was now dark. The fading light from the window silhouetted his body. He grunted and called out my name. He pushed his hand back through his sweaty hair, his eyes were closed, and he thrusted hard into the pillows now pushed up against the living room wall. He had no idea I was even gone.
And at first, I didn’t know how gone I was either.
I sat back in the shadows and pulled the black, snake-like cords around me. I closed my eyes and listened to each thrust against the pillows like the surf beating the sand. I imagined my seashell pushed further down into the sand with each wave. There I went. He didn’t even have to touch me and I knew I was still shrinking. If I didn’t do something soon, I would be buried forever and seashells were not like seeds. They didn’t grow into any new.
I once dated a guy who got growing pains after sex. And you know, maybe it was in his dick.
M. M. Kaufman lives in New Orleans where she earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. She has work published with Slush Pile Magazine, Ellipsis, Memoir Mixtapes, and Tuck Magazine.
Photo on Foter.com