Growing into the Job, Post 511: A New Career Opportunity, p2: Prologue

I woke to the <Bzzt> of my phone.

The room was dim, cast in the deep blue haze of early evening, the only light filtering in through the half-drawn blinds. My brain was sluggish, my body heavier than usual, pinned to the mattress by the aftereffects of an afternoon nap that had lasted far longer than I intended. Yes, the visit Melissa and I had had at the ‘Regression Clinic’ was exhausting, as was the uh…manual relief Melissa had offered me afterwards, but I’d been out for - I dunno. It was dark. A long time. 

The air in the apartment was warm, the sheets tangled around my legs, and for a long moment, I just lay there, eyes half-lidded, the sound of my own breathing the only thing in the quiet.

<Bzzt>

Another buzz.

I sighed, forcing my arm to move, reaching blindly for the phone that had somehow ended up half-buried in the comforter beside me. Squinting at the screen - I really might need reading glasses soon - I winced as my eyes adjusted to the brightness.

Jewel Montgomery [6:02 PM]: Oh no, naughty doctor - did you forget about me? 😉

I blinked. My still-fogged brain lagged behind the implications. And - yikes, it was after 6 already? I’d slept for more than four hours! But what was she…? Oh yeah. Shit…

<Bzzt>

Jewel Montgomery [6:02 PM]: We were supposed to do your EHR training at 5 remember? But I guess somebody needed his beauty sleep.

Shit shit shit. 

I exhaled through my nose, rubbing a hand over my face as I read the messages again, trying to shake off the dregs of sleep. I had completely forgotten. Or rather, I hadn’t forgotten, I had just…passed out. I honestly hadn’t meant to crash so hard, but I guess the sheer mental exhaustion of the day had dragged me under.

I reread the texts again, reading into the tone: flirty, playful, teasing. And then I remembered Jewel.

I could still picture her vividly from this morning. One of the new breed of Amazons bussed in from California to staff the new wings (that’s weird, right?). So much, so tall, so confident. A woman built to stop traffic, yet somehow she carried herself like she was something even more than that. And now, apparently, she had my number.

How the hell did she get my number?

Even though this was all 100% strange, I started to type a response, something polite, something vaguely apologetic, but before I could even tap the first letter-

<BANG.>

The door slammed open.

“”Oh my, Jay honey - you’re still in bed?!?”

I barely had a second to register what was happening before a tornado in a white dress barreled into the room.

Towering. Flushed. Breathless. Looking, as usual, like some impossibly curvy goddess - but one who had just stormed down from Olympus to scold her mortal for oversleeping. My girlfriend, Melissa. 

She planted herself in the middle of my crummy little studio apartment. If she noticed how disheveled and starting to fill up with her shoe boxes it was (more had been delivered today, and sat unopened by the door), she paid that no mind. Her hands were on her hips, eyes wide with incredulity. She was strikingly massive, everything about her  too much for this small apartment, her presence too big for the dim, quiet space.

“We have dinner with Lucia Antonucci and her team in an hour!” she exclaimed. .

I winced, blinked at her, then at my phone. Then back at her. I didn’t even noticing the windows rattling, the dishes and glassware shivering in the cabinets. 

Ah. Shit.

Melissa clapped her hands, and now I saw how she made the whole damn apartment shake. “Up, up, up! Come on, Jay, we have to leave in - forty minutes!”

I groaned, rubbing my eyes, still trying to catch up with the situation. The windows were still rattling in their frames, the water glass on the nightstand had nearly toppled over, and my body felt like lead.

“Melissa-” I started, voice rough from sleep.

“Nope!” she interrupted, already marching toward my tiny closet. “We don’t have time for you to be a grump. You are getting up, right now, and you are putting on - this.”

She yanked the rented suit off the rack and held it up, wrinkled, slightly misshapen from where she’d crammed it back in there after Friday’s gala. She eyed it, unimpressed.

“Hm. Kinda wrinkly. And it’s probably a little big on you now.” She glanced back at me, narrowing her eyes. “Did you get even smaller during your nap??”

I blinked at her. “What? N-no.” No. No no no no no. I had my appointment with the endocrinologist tomorrow - Melissa had finally agreed to let me go - but still it was frightening. “No.”

Melissa hummed, unconvinced, but tossed the suit onto the bed anyway.

I ran a hand through my hair, still struggling to piece myself together. Wait - wasn’t this suit supposed to be returned over the weekend?

She gasped. “Oh my god, it was.” A pause. Then she grinned. “Well, good thing we still have it!”

I groaned again, rubbing my temples and trying to ignore the feeling that she may have just read my mind. Life was just too fucked up to worry about everything - my job, my health, the fact that my girlfriend was ascending into some sort of superhuman - all at once. 

Melissa, meanwhile, was already picking through my tie selection like it was some major decision. I knew most would be way too long now, and the one from Friday had some weird stains on it, from who knows what. I exhaled, finally pushing myself up into a seated position, feeling the grogginess settle deep in my bones.

“Melissa,” I said slowly, “I can dress myself.”

That got a reaction. She laughed. Laughed. Like I’d just made a joke .

“Oh, babe,” she giggled, shaking her head of huge, brunette hair, as she settled on an old tie and tossed it over a chair, “those days are so over.”

I opened my mouth, but before I could form an actual response, she was already leaned towards me, tugging at the hem of my scrub shirt. 

“Come on, arms up,” she directed, a teasing glint in her eyes.

I sighed heavily. But I lifted my arms anyway.

The fabric peeled away, and I tried not to notice how much smaller I looked compared to her. Tried not to notice how huge she was, how the width of her hips and thighs, in her white pencil dress, dominated all the space in front of me.

Melissa just smirked. She knew what I was looking at.

She tossed the scrub shirt aside, hands finding my thin shoulders: big, warm hands, sliding down my arms, thumbs brushing over my shrunken biceps in a way that felt like she was assessing me, testing me for size.  

“Hm,” she murmured thoughtfully, biting her lip. “Y’know, me getting you dressed, this is like the first part of our assignment.”

I swallowed. “Our w-what?”

“Our homework. From Dr. Chou.”

I tensed.

She grinned, tilting her head. “Don’t tell me you forgot?”

Oh, I hadn’t forgotten, but I tried to keep my expression neutral. “Melissa, are we actually-?”

“Of course we’re going to do it,” she said, breezy, like it was obvious. “Why wouldn’t we?”

I hesitated, struggling to find the right words.

Melissa had loved the session at the Regression Clinic. Loved it. To her, it was something that would bring us closer. ‘Strengthen our bond.’ ‘Increase our, like, intimacy.’

To me? I tried not to think too hard about what it was to me. Because if I let myself admit the truth - if I acknowledged, even for a second, that it was both half-terrifying and secretly thrilling - then I’d have to deal with the fact that it was real. That Melissa was serious about it. That she was going to make me go through with this “Regression Thetapy” no matter what I thought. And I’d learned a good while ago that it was easier not to argue. But still…

I took a breath, keeping my tone casual. “It just…felt a little…”

She arched a perfect brow. “A little what?”

I fought the urge to squirm. “A little…weird.”

Melissa laughed again. Light. Sweet. Totally unbothered. “Oh, Jay,” she cooed, brushing a hand through my hair. “You worry too much.”

I opened my mouth, but she kissed my forehead - actually kissed my forehead, like I was a kid - and just like that, the conversation was over.

Melissa turned her attention back to the suit, humming cheerfully. I just sat there, shirtless, feeling incredibly aware of the fact that my girlfriend could pick me up and throw me over her shoulder whenever she wanted. But now, apparently, she was going to start dressing me.

This was fine. Everything was fine.

Melissa was already moving.

I barely had time to react before she had me stood up, crouched in front of me with her hands at my waist. Quickly she was undoing the tie to my scrub pants with the same casual efficiency she’d use to unwrap a gift.

Before I knew it, the pants were pooled at my ankles. Her hands were back at my hips, on the waistband of my oversized boxers.

I twitched.

“Hey, wait-”

Too late.

She yanked them down, and suddenly I was standing there in absolutely nothing, my half-erect cock swaying slightly, still tumescent from sleep and quickly waking up further as I glanced down into the structured neckline of her dress. The chill of the room had hit me all at once but-

“Shhhh….”

Her hand was on me, she was getting on her knees. Leaning in…

She looked up at me with those eyes, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. 

“Let my mouth make you feel better…”

…

…

I was reeling, vision still swimming. She was already talking. And standing over me as if she hadn’t just nearly sucked my brain out through my cock. 

“So,” she began brightly, shaking out the suit slacks she’d pulled up off the bed, casually sparing me a glance. “I was thinking we could get started on some more of our homework.”

I swallowed. Hard.

“More h-h-…h-homework?” I could barely speak. 

“From the Regression Clinic, silly.”

I stared up at her. Yeah, we had just been talking about it, but my brain felt like it had just been erased. 

She smiled. Beatific.

“You remember, right?”

I did. Now I did.

Melissa hummed, ticking items off on her fingers. “Permission protocol, ‘letting go’ exercises…some of the feeding stuff. We can do that at dinner-”

My stomach plummeted. I gawked at her. “Wait. At dinner?”

Melissa blinked, tilting her head. “Yeah?”

I couldn’t breathe.

“Melissa,” I tried, voice tight, “we’re going to dinner. With Lucia Anto-…”

“…nucci?”

“Antonucci, yes. Lucia Antonucci and her team.”

She giggled. “And?”

“And?!” I gestured wildly. “And you want us to act like that in front of people? People we don’t know??” I guess I’d gotten my voice back. 

Her grin was slow, indulgent. Patient. “Well, yeah.” She smoothed a hand down my bare chest. “That’s kind of the point.”

I struggled to process.

She beamed. “Remember the public cues training? We want to make you comfortable acting this way around others,” she prompted sweetly, “Here, stand up, let me dress you.”

I stood, on shaky limbs, but really I wanted to sink into the floor.

Melissa, meanwhile, was utterly unfazed, holding my slacks up to my waist, then stepping closer to a crouch, telling me to lift my right leg, then slipping my foot into the pants, pulling them up. “Now the left one, sweetie.”

She had my pants pulled up, was buttoning them. Zipping my fly. Dressing me like a doll.

“And then later tonight,” she continued, as if I weren’t about to disintegrate, “we can do some of the at-home assignments. Your daily check-in, bedtime rituals…”

Bedtime. Rituals.

I tried to breathe.

I tried to breathe.

I tried to breathe.

For someone with an IQ under 100, she sure had a damn good memory for this stuff.

My brain was swimming, Melissa was still talking, still dressing me. She worked efficiently, tugging the sleeve of my crumpled dress shirt up my right arm. Thrn she helped me get my left arm in, too. She was gentle about it, but there was no mistaking the dynamic here. She was dressing me like I couldn’t do it myself. Like I was some helpless little thing that needed her help. Like this was normal.

I swallowed as she smoothed the fabric over my shoulders, stepping closer, looming over me in the dim apartment light. Her fingers, bigger and stronger yet more deft and dexterous than they had any right to be, started to button the shirt for me slowly, methodically, knuckles brushing against my stomach, my ribs, my chest.

I tensed.

Melissa, utterly unfazed, kept talking.

“So, after our appointment with Dr. Chou today in the Regression Clinic,” she said lightly, finishing the top two buttons, having moved on to the third, “I said hi to Marta from WGGB and her cute little camera guy.”

I blinked.

“What?”

“The news team, silly,” she giggled, tilting her head, finishing the last button. “She was here to do a story on the Estat…Esther..Esta-

“The Aesthetics Clinic?”

“Yeah that,” she continued blithely, “says she wants to come back and do something on each of the other clinics, too. I said it was okay.” She smiled, still buttoning me in to my shirt. “She promised me some time on camera next time.” Another button.

She paused. 

“I like being on TV.”

Done with my shirt, she stepped back a bit to inspect her work. She nodded, apparently pleased, and reached for the tie that was draped over the chair. “Oh! And then I had my brain booster session with Katie and Randi.”

I stopped breathing.

“Your… what?”

She just laughed.

“You know - the E…C..WC…thing?” She turned, grinning, looping the tie around my neck, popping my collar and beginning to knot the tie for me. “The electricity headband thing?”

I gaped at her. “The electro wave therapy thing??” I’d read some articles about the new cognitive enhancement tech - and was still more than a bit incredulous. I’d also known that Evolution had requested a couple of units for research, but hadn’t heard anything else. They had the units here?? “You let them do that to you?!”

She snorted. “Yeah, duh,” she answered, pulling the tie knot up to my neck, “Who doesn’t want to be smarter?”

My stomach dropped.

“Melissa,” I tried, voice tight, “th-that’s experimental. It’s literally designed to modify your-”

“Oh, please,” she scoffed, yanking the tie, making me stumble forward, making me need her to catch me. “You’re just scared I’m gonna get smarter than you.” She stuck her tongue out at me, like a brat. “And you’re mad it doesn’t work on men.”

My blood went cold.

“That’s ridiculous,” I snapped too quickly, “the EWCE is only supposed to raise IQs by, like, fifteen or so points.”

She just giggled, and set back to adjusting my tie knot. 

But, actually, it wasn’t ridiculous. This woman, and women everywhere suddenly, were - to say the least - full of surprises. The thought, the possibility that she could actually become smarter through some manipulation of her neurology - that was disturbing enough. But if suddenly she was smarter than me?? That this towering, busty, overgrown - let’s admit it - bimbo could suddenly have an intellectual edge? It made my skin crawl, thinking what she could do. It also made my cock harden…

“Hm,” she commented, looking at the job she’d done with my tie, hands on hips, brows cocked in an analytical eye, “this tie’s too long.”

My skin was crawling not just because of how humiliating it would be, how much more emasculated I would feel if she suddenly had that final advantage over me, an intellect. But because I knew, deep down, that it could make her dangerous. Right now Melissa, this young woman, was somehow developing strength and powers beyond anything that could be considered human or explained by the laws of physics. So far, though, she seemed blithely ignorant of what she could really do, and I liked to think my presence and level head were keeping her in check. But I pictured a day where my advice would no longer mean anything to her, if she finally saw her potential and no longer wanted me holding her back.

And that? That terrified me. But what she told me next possibly terrified me even more. 

”No tie for you tonight,” she said, deftly untying her knot and yanking the tie from around my neck.

Well, not that. I don’t love ties, actually. Never have. It was something else that made my stomach drop. Melissa had turned to the closet, rifling through the mess of my half-organized shoes, humming to herself when - so casually, like it was nothing - she said:

“Oh, by the way-”

I swallowed.

She straightened, holding socks and a pair of my dress shoes, tapping the heels together. “I had my tea with Rina this afternoon.”

I froze. Everything inside me went still.

”Wh-wh-what?”

She turned, holding the shoes, grinning like she hadn’t just set my soul on fire. “Oh, you knew about that, right?” She leaned down, pushing me back onto the bed so I could sit. “She says she told you. That you two were DM’ing earlier today.” Melissa was kneeling in front of me as she grasped my ankle, guiding my foot into the first sock, then shoe. She looked up at me, saw the shock still on my face, maybe washed with confusion. “She’s your ex-girlfriend, remember?”

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. 

Rina. Yes, she had told me that she and Melissa were going to meet up. It had upset me then and, conveniently, I’d been able to put that little fact out of my head and forgotten all about it. Until now.

Rina, the woman who had once known me better than anyone. The woman who had witnessed all of it - my every shameful little desire, every hidden weakness. The woman who had, so effortlessly, reduced me to less than a man. The woman who had breastfed me like I was her own goddamn infant. 

And Melissa had now had tea with her?!

I stared down at her.

Melissa, utterly unbothered, focused on lacing my shoe. “She’s so nice,” she mused, smiling.

I nearly choked.

Nice? Nice?! Rina was about as nice as a goddamn kestrel.

Melissa guided my other foot into its shoe, humming softly as she tied the laces with a practiced ease that made my skin prickle. And then, as she tightened the knot, as her fingers brushed the arch of my foot, as she glanced up at me with that look-

“We have a lot to talk about.”

My pulse roared in my ears.

What did she mean?? “Y-you and Rina?” My voice came out hoarse.

Melissa grinned. She tugged the final knot snug.

“No,” she beamed, “You and me.”

Then she rose, slow and seamless, towering over me and blowing me a puckered kiss before she turned toward the full-length mirror by the door. She had to step back to see herself fully. Far back. And as she did, as she admired the impossibly statuesque woman in white that looked back at her. 

I just sat there. Tied, buttoned, laced. Dressed. Jaw in its usual and customary position when faced with a head-to-toe Melissa Monroe: hanging. 

I gulped. Not for the first time today, probably not for the tenth, because there she was: woman. The woman, and I was watching her, again.

She sighed, tilting her head as she considered her reflection, adjusting the fit of her dress’ squared, structured neckline over her massive bust, flesh bulging in nearly obscene jiggles up to her collarbone. “I don’t have anything else here to change into for tonight,” she mused, now smoothing the tight fabric over her devastating hips, “So this work dress will have to do.”

Like it was some consolation prize. Like she wasn’t standing there, so absurdly built, so staggeringly out of scale with the very room around her, adjusting her flowing brunette waves, fixing again the penciled skirt of her dress that clung like a second skin to the soft, rolling dynamite of her hips and thighs.

My brain, I think, had short-circuited. It always did, when I looked at her like this. She, honestly, was too much, but my eyes couldn’t get enough of her, and I was barely blinking. She’d been too much since the moment I met her, since the moment she stepped into my office three months ago, since the moment she smiled at me during her interview.

And now - somehow - she was more. A woman built like a statue, like the statue, that impossibly colossal figure in the atrium, the one that loomed over the entrance to the wings of the building, stretching toward the ceiling, sculpted in full, divine excess. That statue was a giantess, a titan, a colossus.

And Melissa Monroe was catching up. A real woman. A growing woman with her sights set high. And she was fixing herself up for dinner.

My breathing had already gone shallow as she leaned toward her purse, retrieving her makeup: lipstick, mascara. She uncapped the mascara first, approaching the mirror - but, of course, she had to lean down, she had to bend at the hip, tilting forward, planting one hand firmly on her thigh.

Had I lost my goddamn mind? 

The angles, the curves, the slow, practiced movement of her body shifting, weight shifting, every line of her ludicrous hourglass shifting as she lifted the mascara wand and began to paint her long lashes.

My throat dried.

She blinked, dragging the dark brush through her lashes, then glanced at me through the mirror. “Oh,” she said casually, “I also went to visit my monkeys today.”

I blinked. That snapped me out of it.

I sat up a little straighter. “Wh-what monkeys?”

She smiled, dipping the wand back into the tube. “You know,” she smiled proudly, “My guys downstairs.”

Her monkeys: the guys that lived in the basement, the men who had been drawn to her. That there were two-dozen of them - no, more than two-dozen by now, probably closer to thirty grown men living in the basement of the facility - should have weirded me out more than it did. Still, though, I wasn’t exactly ‘used’ to it, to the idea of it. That they were there, and that she considered them…hers. They worked as janitors, maintenance staff, running odd jobs for the center. And yet-

Melissa adjusted her stance, switching to her lipstick.

As she tilted her chin, as she slowly rolled the tube upward, revealing the bold, glistening red of the pigment within, I watched. I watched as she parted those lips, whose rouge pigment now marked my cock, from just minutes ago. I watched as she pressed new color to them, as she dragged, slow, sure, full, plushing them up, painting them richly..

I’d forgotten to breathe, so I gasped a little.

She giggled at me, and puckered her lips in a <smack> to settle the color.

And then she kept talking.

“They had a little ceremony downstairs today, my monkeys,” she mused, examining her work in the mirror, running her tongue lightly over the perfect, wet, crimson bow of her lips.

I swallowed. “A…a c-ceremony?” What could she mean? “Wh-what kind of ceremony?” I asked, trying to focus.

Melissa just smiled. “They just wanted to celebrate me, recognize me for the new job. You know how they are...”

I didn’t know. I had no idea because she wasn’t saying everything. I could tell by the way she said it, by the way she grinned: she was holding something back. Like, whatever was happening in that basement was something more than I wanted to understand. But before I could ask -

She turned, and stood.

To her full.

Towering.

Colossal.

Height.

And sighed, glancing down at her shoes.

“Too many lip marks on these,” she pouted, already moving toward the boxes of new high heeled shoes piled by the door, “I’ll need another pair for tonight.” I watched her enormous rear bulge, a heart-shaped marvel as she bent over to pick a box up, and tried not to think whose ‘lip marks’ were on my girlfriend’s shoes.

“Jay,” she said sweetly, looking away from the shoeboxes and back over her broad, gorgeous shoulder.

“Help me pick a pair?”

=====================================================