Chapter 7 #2
“Oh, yeah, it’s okay. In fact, it could be more than okay. I don’t know if your theory is right because I think my dick might actually be a little bigger than before. Maybe we didn’t shrink, and we actually grew.”
She grabbed his waistband, yanking him toward her. “Let me see.”
“Doesn’t it look a little bigger?”
“No, it looks the same.” She released the waistband, satisfied at hearing it snap against her husband’s taut stomach.
“Maybe we should kiss again.” He appeared earnest in this suggestion.
Catalina furrowed her brow as she eyed him in suspicion. There was no way she was putting herself under his spell again. Look what happened the last time. She was stuck in a worse situation than before when all she wanted was to never see his smug face again. Catalina crossed her arms. “Why?”
“If kissing made us shrink, then maybe kissing again could return things to how they were before.”
“That makes no sense at all. Why would kissing cause any of this? We’ve kissed plenty of times and never shrunk once.”
“But we’ve never kissed inside this room before,” he replied.
Okay, well, he had her there. In the face of a complete lack of viable options, she didn’t have any better solutions to offer.
His plan was at least doable with very little effort or resources.
“Fine,” she said after a moment, regretting the word when a grin slid across his face as though she’d agreed to date him again.
“I don’t know what you’re smiling about. It’s not as if this is going to work.”
His expression didn’t waver. “But I get to kiss you again.”
Cat rolled her eyes to keep from melting, because although Trey could be an aggravating bonehead, sometimes he said the sweetest things. When he did, it was easy to overlook all the times he made her mad by being an aggravating bonehead. “All right, let’s get this over with.”
She didn’t have to tell him twice as he strode to her, fitting his arms around her. Before he could go further, she pecked him on the lips. “There. See? Nothing’s changed. Everything’s still weird.”
“No. Come on. That doesn’t count.” His forehead wrinkled in deep dissatisfaction, and his hand remained locked on her waist.
“You really think this is a practical joke the universe is playing on us? Rating the passion of our kiss in order to determine if we deserve to be unshrunk?”
“If we’re going to try this for real, Cat, you need to do it with your whole self. Stop half-assing it.”
“Did you read that on an inspiration poster somewhere?”
“Kiss me.” The heated intensity between them had returned, and he wasn’t backing down.
With this she accepted the inevitable, relaxing in his arms, as his nose nudged hers.
“Kiss me,” he said again in a soft breath, reminding her of when they first started dating, when he’d get soft and gentle, making her ache.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she let her lips press against his.
There wasn’t the hot zapping along her skin she had experienced the previous time, but the kiss could still be described as lovely.
Wonderfully familiar and, yet, thrilling, she felt it all the way to the depths of her stomach.
While she doubted this kiss would solve any of their current problems, both in terms of their marriage and, more importantly, the whole shrinking issue—it was a kiss of promise, as if anything was possible.
If a kiss could cause a miracle, it should be this one.
When their lips finally parted, she didn’t want to open her eyes, preferring to stay in the blissful darkness of whatever reality her mind chose to believe.
“Fuck,” Trey said when the environment around them remained unchanged.
“Yup. I told you that kissing wasn’t going to work.”
“Maybe we should try it again. Last time, you were pressed against the wall, and I was touching—”
“Stop,” she said, yanking from his grasp. “It’s not going to work. No more kissing.” Catalina couldn’t take the overwhelming emotions yo-yoing inside her chest. It was exhausting.
“Okay. Then what do you suggest?”
She hiked her heavy bag on her shoulder as she thought about it.
“I don’t know,” Catalina admitted because she had no idea how to change their situation.
On a whim, she retrieved her cell phone from her purse.
She wasn’t sure what the emergency number was in Mexico.
Did they also use 911? How would they explain the situation without being immediately hung up on? It was worth a shot.
“Oh, good idea,” Trey said, pulling out his own phone from his pocket. He soon frowned, tried dialing, and frowned again. “No service. You?”
“Same.” She tossed her phone back into her bag. “Maybe the phone is too small to get a signal, like it can't connect with the antennas or something.”
“Is that really a thing?”
She didn’t know, but it seemed to be a reasonable explanation. She shrugged and considered sitting on the floor and waiting for…well…something to happen because what else were they going to do?
“We can’t just stay here forever. I’m leaving,” Trey said after a moment.
“We haven’t even been in here for ten minutes. Where the hell are you going to go? What exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can find someone to help us.”
“You might be one inch tall. You have a better chance of being stepped on.”
“Maybe you’re one inch tall, but I was six foot two. That has to make me taller than just one inch.” Trey went to the wall with the gap at the bottom and crouched on his side.
Catalina leaned a shoulder against a wall, watching him go, trying to fake aloofness as though she didn’t care what he did and wasn’t at all worried about him. “Fine. Go get help. I’ll wait for you here.”
He gave her one last winning grin before saying, “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll rescue us, and then we’ll see about more kissing.” He then slid between the gap and was gone.
She was alone.
Being by herself was what she’d been asking for this whole vacation.
Except once Catalina had it, she didn’t like it much.
Unsettled, she began to pace. Catalina shouldn’t go to him.
She should stay put. Wasn’t this the standard advice given to people who were lost?
If this was the one spot in the world that could transform them into something tiny, then it had to be the exact spot with the ability to make them normal height again.
She was playing it smart and took a seat on the ground, determined to be content with her decision.
It only took for her husband to make an oof sound somewhere outside the walls, like he had fallen or gotten hurt, for fear and anxiety to pierce her gut, sending her scrambling to her feet.
What if something happened to him? How would she even know if it did?
Their phones didn’t work. She was going to let him go out there and risk getting stepped on or eaten by a giant spider while she remained here fiddling with the straps of her bag?
Granted, her decision to sit here was the wisest one, but between her and Trey, she was the one who took care of spiders in their apartment because he’d always had an extreme phobia about them.
If he saw one, he’d freeze, making it easy for a spider to capture him and bring him back to a web lair where he’d be feasted on by a bunch of baby spiders and—
“Trey!” she yelled, running to the gap. “Trey!” She slid under the wall opening, frantic to find him.
“What?” He popped up, completely fine, and wasn’t far from the edge of the platform she was on, standing on one of the synthetic haystacks, which she realized was the low pile of hotel carpeting.
“God, you scared me.”
“Miss me already?” Trey started trekking away from her, jumping from one carpet haystack pile to another, like he was rock hopping on a river.
She carefully slid off the edge of the platform and was surprised to find the carpet pile holding her weight, and she didn’t sink into it like quicksand.
Cat followed his lead, going after him. “No, it's just… What if there are spiders out there? You know, you don’t do well around spiders, and you’re just…
” She panted for breath from this exertion of energy and her large bag weighing her down.
“…six foot two packed into something very small.”
She stopped to take a breather, putting her hands on her hips, calculating how much distance was between them and the booth in case they needed to return in a hurry.
They stood beside a silver pillar, which she guessed was part of a single chair leg.
There were four of them evenly spaced out and a larger platform overhead on the pillars.
His carpet hopping paused as he turned to face her. Some of the cockiness dissipated from his features, his tanned skin turning pale. “Oh… Well, I’ll just stay away from dark corners. It’ll be fine.” He didn’t look fine at all, his eyes darting about, his posture on edge.
And then came the worst sound Catalina had ever heard in her life.