Michael's Crush
by jubesdre
A young amazonic woman's journey of self-discovery is aided by a special friend


You meet Michael when you are fifteen. You meet at a religious youth
conference, a protest, a coffee house. He is older, though shorter, and has a
girlfriend, even older and even shorter, who is not as friendly as he is. He
is a teller of warm stories. She is full of cold questions. "How tall are you
and how much do you weigh?" she asks rudely. "I'm five-foot-eleven barefoot,
but these are five-inch stilettos," you answer boldly, stepping forward,
forcing them to look straight up, "and I'm still growing. I'm not one of those
girls who know how much they weigh. I just know how good I look." Gasp. You
muse aloud about how you are technically still a child while they are over
eighteen, and yet you tower above them. Making conversation, he tells you
about his upbringing in DC in the "dangerous" 80s, the first girl he fell in
love with, moving to Virginia with his father, buying a gun after a terrible
thing happened to his younger sister. You exchange telephone numbers. His
girlfriend glares at you. You pat her on the head in parting. As expected, he
calls the next day.

He is a graphic design major at a school in the city where you live.
Pittsburgh. He thinks that you are incredibly cool. He has an apartment, a
great music collection, broad shoulders and a nice build despite his
less-than-average height. He calls and says things like, "Shall we meet at The
Grind and reminisce about the glory days of the Klingon empire?" At fifteen,
you thought that he was a strange agent. You didn't appreciate his quirky
phrases. Before long it was apparent that you were the more mature, the much
stronger in every way.

But years later, as a senior in college, considering writing something about
him, you think back and find his trekky tendencies slightly endearing.
Admiring your long strong fingers, you know you could have blown his mind even
more than you did that one day, that one summer day when you chose to wear
your jean shorts, which more properly would be called jean panties, to one of
your innocent trysts at his apartment. Alone in the sweaty afternoon, sitting
next to each other on his bed, the rotating fan blowing your long silky hair
and teardrop earrings, you caught him eyeing the long well-defined legs which
your jean "panties" exposed so well. You smiled at him, but he had not
realized you had caught him and continued to stare transfixed at your legs.
"Want to sit on my lap?" you asked, breaking the silence. He snapped alert,
looked at you but could not speak. "Here let me do it," you breathed huskily,
reaching over with both of your hands on either side of his buttocks and
lifting him onto your naked legs. Even sitting on your lap, you were able to
rest your chin on the top of his head. Your breasts cushioned his back, easily
supporting him. Your long right hand snaked around his stomach, almost like a
seatbelt. His little socked feet extended only just past your kneecaps. "LIKE
this?" Again no response. "Then how about..." Not sure just what you were
doing until you had done it, you spread your legs just enough for him to slide
down a few inches in between them. "Diane," he finally said nervously. You
slowly began to flex your thigh muscles, gently squeezing them into him.
"WHAT?" you asked in a loud deep voice you had never heard yourself speak in
before, and pressed his tummy firmly with your big hand. "You're hurting..."
he began weakly, but was interrupted by sound of the front door. His
girlfriend. Panic struck him as he tried hopelessly to remove himself. You
extended your right pinky a few inches downward and lightly tapped a very
rigid portion of his pants. Just as you thought. You curled your pinky in and
brought your hard nail down until it displaced his not-quite-as-hard penis.
Then you let him go like a shot, almost into his girlfriend's arms as she
entered the room. Never before had you felt the strange way you did that day.
The feeling did not return and honestly you were glad. But you still wore
those jean shorts sometimes.

You had met him at The Grind the week before leaving for college. He brought a
pack of cigarettes to celebrate the occasion. He tells you that you are going
to be one hell of a woman. You smile down and remind him that you already are.
He buys you a pot of your favorite tea. You promise to keep in touch, knowing
that you already have the capacity of insincerity for the sake of convenience.
You are leaving. New York awaits, as do New York's more impressive men.
Business men, rich men, strong men. Not nerds.

He sends you mixtapes which you listen to on your headphones late at night
when you have papers to write. You do this for a number of reasons: 1) Your
small roommate with the large proboscis sleeps as quietly as a bandsaw. 2) You
are homesick. 3) The tapes are really good. 4) Four...You stop at four, delete
the list from your otherwise blank computer screen and try to formulate a
thesis for the paper due tomorrow at noon. Are you going to have to flirt with
the professor again to get an extension? This would be no moral issue for you.
But it is simply pathetic to watch men squirm so. "You DARE criticize me?" you
once bellowed, leaning forward into the face of the professor during a private
conference. The little man began to stutter and you put your hand on his
kneecap. Even from there your fingers with their long manicured nails seemed
nearly able to reach his crotch. You stroked his pants leg, assuring him with
an ivory smile that you were only joking about being upset. You remember how
easy the rest of the semester was as you climb into bed and listen to
Michael's music, grab a stuffed bear and pretend it is him, moving in and out
of sleep until the sun comes up.

During your sophomore year, you stop returning his calls and forget to send
him birthday mail. You have met someone. Victor: tall, strong and rich. Almost
as tall, strong and rich as you. You do not love him. You would have to be
stupid to love him, but he cannot quite make you stupid enough. Rather, he
facilitates your insincerity, cultivates your saccharine lies. He offers you a
clumsy-looking diamond ring and you accept, for the time being, knowing this
will hurt him later and he will only have himself to blame. Stupid man.

***

Michael still has the girlfriend that he had when you first met, Agnes.
Pathetic. But the couples of little Michael and littler Agnes and of tall
Victor and taller you both break up during the same holiday season. You call
Michael. He's so depressed, he tells you, he's eaten half a cake today. You
need the weight, you think to yourself. You, on the other hand, have been
eating every meal like it's Thanksgiving dinner, feeding your unbelievable,
still growing body. It's been three days for you, four for him, since the
breakups. Your mother brings some junk food and a funny magazine to your room.
You love her but do not want her offerings. How old does she think you are,
anyway? Does she even see the type of woman her daughter is becoming? You
don't want her. The only thing that you want is the phone when adoring little
Michael calls.

You go back to school. Call him from New York almost every night for the rest
of the semester. He's just like a little brother, you think, though he's
several years older than you. But he begins to tell you things, that "if you
weren't so far away...", and asks if you're still getting taller, and then he
sighs and you change the subject. One night when you are feeling low, he tells
you that you are beautiful as if you didn't know.

On a Tuesday, in your Victorian Literature class your heart begins to pound
and you feel your throat close up. The teacher is lecturing on the irony of
the Napoleonic Julien Sorel's attitude toward his love interest. "He believes
he is in control, yet we know that she is an imposing woman--six feet tall.
She could crush him!" Your fists clench. You slide your homework onto his desk
and rush out. Back in your dorm room, you call your mother, cry, and then fall
asleep. You wake up the next day, glad that whatever had come over you has
passed. You don't know that it has only begun. The anger attacks keep coming.
You combat them with wine, yet another stupid boy on campus interested in
letting you do whatever you want to with his body, and phone calls to Michael.
Still, they come and you constantly feel as though you need to really break
someone, as though some demoness with a pickaxe wants you to join her in
destroying someone's vulnerable fault line. There is a map of the world in
your room. Take it down. Now is not the time to think about plate tectonics.

***

You go home for the summer. Evaluations from your teachers arrive in the post.
You did surprisingly well for being a wreck. But then again, all of your
professors are afraid of you, and they all want to fuck you. Perhaps it's not
insincerity, you think to yourself, perhaps it's fraud. Take a shot of vodka
and go to bed. Quit your job. Cry in the hammock in your mother's courtyard.
Become a cliché: go to therapy dressed in expensive heels and a vintage dress
to talk about how your parents' divorce ruined your life. Cry, accept tissues
from your shrink. Now terrified, you have lost your capacity for insincerity.
Cry harder when this becomes clear to you. Grab the little clay model of an
alien planet that Michael made, tempered hard in the kiln. (He was so proud,
so shy about giving it to you. "This can be our world," he suggested.) Crush
it with your bare hand.

Sometime in the center of the summer you receive a thick package of papers.
Last fall you applied to spend your junior year in England. The program of
your choice has accepted you. Oxford. And you didn't even include a picture of
yourself this time. Your parents sit you down and say "You must go." You look
at them, here in the same room together again where you all used to be when
you were little, before the divorce. Now everything has changed, especially
relative sizes. You laugh. It's pathetic how many tears they waste this
summer. You wish they would just leave you alone. You would rather have
NOTHING than all that is being offered to you. You would rather have small
potatoes, i.e. dozens of men to bully and fuck. An ex-boyfriend once spent an
hour talking about how you can make vodka out of potatoes. You wish you had
taken notes. Instead you told him to shut up, stop being boring and fuck you
or else you were leaving.

Go to the courtyard of your mother's apartment building, her cordless phone
bobbing beneath the strap of your bikini bottom. Call Michael. Two hours later
he is there with you in the courtyard. He has brought a bottle of port and a
pack of your favorite kind of smokes. You tell him how scared you are.

"I'm not going," you say. "I'm not ready, I don't want to and they can't make
me. I'm bigger than them."

He gets up, tells you to come with him. You follow him, his soft little hand
in your soft huge hand, out of the courtyard and down the lamp-lit street to
his car. You stand there with sidewalk beneath your bare feet wondering what
this is about. He opens the trunk, pulls out a baseball bat, and tells you,
"Close your eyes." You comply. Sensing that he has lifted the bat you flinch
and open your eyes. "See," he says, "you sensed danger and naturally protected
yourself." You punch him in the shoulder, not hard. Michael drops the bat and
embraces you, the side of his head tentatively just gracing the lower portion
of your left boob. You hug him back, very hard, cupping the back of his head
with your left hand and mashing his face into your boob. "Ya'd need a bat to
reach my head, wouldn't ya?" you tease. His reply is muffled. "You knew I
wasn't going to hurt you and I think you know that Oxford won't kill you
either," he offers. You lift him up easily. It is like embracing and holding
aloft a child. "No, I knew ya COULDN'T hurt me but I think YOU know I could
kill ya if I wanted to," you snip back. "COULD I?" you wonder. What if you had
really forced him to answer that before letting him down? When he leaves that
night, he stands on his tiptoes, kisses the bottom of your chin, and says,
"Sleep the sleep of the lusty and busty." You love him for that.

***

You go to England. But that's not really what this story is about. The
following information, however, is appropriate: You take long walks nearly
every day and the anger subsides a little.

You come back from England. It has been a year. You spoke with Michael only a
few times. The connections were always less than perfect and it was hard to
find times when you were both awake and available. During the year he has
gotten a job and moved out of state. He comes to visit when you return. "It
has been a long time since we have reminisced about the glory days," he says.
Your mother loves him, is pleased that he is coming to stay for the weekend.
You go out to your favorite diner for eggplant sandwiches and straw french
fries. Afterwards, you go to an exhibit at your favorite museum. It is about
mirrors and light. While he is mesmerized by a wall-sized projection of
kaleidoscope activity, you walk into a room full of mirrors and black lights.
You are alone so you walk to one of the corners where two mirrors intersect.
You bring your face close to that corner and look at yourself, a thousand
goddesses coming together at once, and you sense what it would be like for
someone your height to kiss you: Fantastic.

He has met someone, tells you about her. You have met very many people. You
enumerate. There was the one from the Canary Islands who wanted to take
size-comparison pictures while you were in his bed. Though he was charming,
you didn't let him. You didn't really trust him because he never paid for your
drinks. There was an older man, late fifties, whom you first seduced in a
church. He did pay for your drinks but by your second gin and tonic was
discussing the possibility of living together. The first time you tried to
make love with him he screamed and thought you broke his back. Weakling. You
had wished that you had a gong like in old television shows. You did like
carrying him up the stairs to bed, though. He liked it too. And then there was
the hot lifeguard whom you forbade to wear a shirt, who almost stole your
heart. But he kept asking to wrestle you. Why did he keep expecting not to
lose? What was he trying to prove to himself? He, like all the rest, were just
not strong enough, just not good enough.

The girl that Michael is dating is a cute little one who, he says, is roughly
the size of one of your "mammoth" legs. He pretends that might bother you. You
go to visit him and you meet her. You approve. She is sweet and wears
motherish sweaters. You like the way she smiles when she looks at him and when
she looks at you she sees no threat. She must understand you are simply too
big for him. Being so small, she says she has always wanted to be taller. "I
wish I was as tall as you!" the tiny woman announces when Michael is out of
the room. "But what would Michael think?" You smile. You are like her favorite
superhero.

On the other hand, the boy that you are dating is probably a bad one. But
you're not done with him yet.

You have a dream. In it you are pregnant. Your present boyfriend, the implicit
father, is absent. It is unclear why, but the point is that he is gone.
Michael appears in the dream. He is not convoluted or warped as dream people
usually are. You hold him and he says something that you will never forget:
"You may not ever have a stronger man in your life but you can have all the
men you choose."

You wake up. The dream was not just a dream. You are two weeks late. You
haven't mentioned this to the present boyfriend yet. He has been acting odd
and you are on your guard. His roommate instantly spills the beans upon your
giving him a threatening look. Boyfriend lost his job and has been selling
black market Xanax to local college kids. Don't tell him about the baby. Just
collect your toothbrush and run. No, fuck the toothbrush, just get out of
there. No. Fight him. End this. No, run before--! He comes home just in time
to see you slip on your heeled open-toe sandals. You crush his shoulder with
your left hand when shaking him, then point a long index finger into his nose
and warn him to get out of your way before you destroy him. Your tires spin in
his gravel driveway and his loud sobbing is your exit music. You had to leave
or else you would have hurt him even more. Driving away, you remember what you
left in his closet. Boyfriend #92 had taken you on one nice date. Dinner and
dancing. The liars can usually dance. You had bought a silk dress for the
occasion. Dark crimson, sleeveless, strapless and backless, plunging cleavage
line, with purplish orchids on one side and a fiery dragon climbing up the
other. You were a goddess in that dress--more than a goddess, a
TITANESS--simply because it allowed you to show off so much of your
goddesslike, titaness body. You receive it by Federal Express the next day,
unrequested. Someone was scared you would return.

Back at mom's house, call Michael. He arrives promptly, though without a
bottle of port. You talk about your life options, go over and over them. He is
the only one who knows who, or what, you are. You can't imagine telling anyone
else the things you tell him. By the end of the conversation you are both
exhausted, drag yourselves inside from the courtyard. He says goodnight, you
bend just enough so he can kiss your chin again, and he goes into the
guestroom. You go to your room. It is the summer before your senior year of
college. This is not as things should be. You pity yourself something awful
and you cry, then laugh, then cry. Your face is in the pillow. You don't want
to worry mom, not yet. But Michael must have heard you because he is crawling
into bed with you. He puts a kiss on your belly which is already becoming
firm, smoothes your hair, spoons you as best he can with his undersized body,
whispers, "Sleep the sleep of the lusty and busty."

Think to yourself: I don't have a stronger man in my life, but I can have any
man I want, when I want, how I want. Right now I can have Michael. Wonder if
the tiny creature growing in your belly will be a boy. If so, pity it at
birth, but love it now whatever it is. This is sincerity. This is real. Listen
to Michael's breathing. Watch his tiny sleeping form as it rests on your
torso, its paltry weight moved up and down by your every breath. Now hold him
and wrap your impossibly long legs around his body. They cover him from the
chest on down. Curl over and press his tiny face into your immense breasts.
You begin to feel a small but constant poke against the gigantic expanse of
your inner right thigh. You hear a sad little muffled moan. Now, with every
muscle, harder than you have ever done before in your life: SQUEEZE.