Mark had exhausted and frustrated himself since arriving home the previous afternoon and finding no sign of his spouse. He couldn’t find any sign of Brad at any size. Ever since Brad had stopped texting late in the afternoon before Mark had returned home from work, he just knew his husband must have been getting up to his usual antics.
He’d expected to find his husband, reduced to some incredibly small scale, in need of his assistance.
But he couldn’t find him.
Making the situation even more baffling was the fact that the shrink ray that had taken both of the men on trips to the amazing world of the small was secured in its case in their bedroom in the night table on Mark’s side of the bed.
Mark’s next course of action had been to close up the house room by room to try and find Brad, whatever size he might be. He started with Brad’s lab and worked his way out from there, back up into the house. Unfortunately, the Chronivac blended in with the other gadgets in Brad's lab, failing to make any impression on the man.
With no sign of his husband on the lower levels, he found himself distracted periodically from his search by the annoyance of a persistent buzzing from one or more flies that had probably gotten inside the house earlier in the day. Not wanting to take a misstep he hardly paid the small black fly any attention, distractedly swatting at it several times over the course of his search, but otherwise staying focused on the task of locating his spouse.
He went to bed defeated, and reasoned that if Brad had decided to shrink himself he’d turn up eventually as he always had. He might have even been watching him as he undressed and slid himself under the covers.
The thought fueled an erection that lasted well beyond when Mark fell asleep. He didn’t notice the fly that had settled itself safely on the bedside table.
The morning didn’t turn out any better for Mark in his quest to find Brad, but he was thankful it was a Sunday so he could focus on re-scouring the house even though it had been fruitless.
And that damned fly that kept distracting him didn’t help things and actively worsened his mood. So that by noon he’d stepped outside into his backyard, with only moments passing before a cheerful voice called out.
Their neighbor, and good friend, Russ waved with an easy smile that quickly fell when Mark turned towards him.
“What?” Mark asked, his voice frustrated and strained.
“Oh. Sorry,” Russ tried smiling a bit more reserved. “You just seem a bit upset — everything good?”
Mark’s ire rose for a brief instant before he calmed himself, dropping his shoulders and sighing.
“It’s Brad.” He sighed. “He’s gone missing.”
“Again?!” Russ asked incredulously. He’d only become privy to Mark and Brad’s secret past time due to a strange set of mishaps the prior November.
Mark laughed a little more dryly than he’d intended.
They hadn’t really talked about it much. Since then, Brad had apologized profusely. Russ had wanted to ask more back then, but he didn’t want to pry.
Now Mark had brought it to him, and he quickly invited Mark over for a break from his search.
Standing in Russ’s garden, the ambient sounds of the day drowning out the approach of the very subject of their discussion, even if they didn’t know it.
“Yeah. He does this every once in a while.” Mark started in with his main grievance as the heat of the outdoors quickly warmed him. He felt temper rise with his temperature. “Irrationally testing the limits of his device without telling anyone.”
Russ couldn’t say he was shocked, but he didn’t know how he’d react to that situation. As he listened, a fly buzzed by his face. As a fan of the outdoors Russ wasn’t one to flinch at the sound of a bug; he swatted at it lazily, missing the insect and sending it spiraling away from him. Out of sight out of mind.
“What do you mean? He didn’t tell you? That seems dangerous given everything that happened… last time.” Russ tried to be delicate about his phrasing.
Mark sighed in frustration. “He…” Mark paused for a moment, torn for an instant on exposing his husband's reckless nature to their friend.
But then a bug buzzed his head again and this time Mark’s annoyance made him lash out with better accuracy. A fingertip smacked against the fly sending it careening towards one of Russ’s vegetable patches.
“He likes to be unseen, like a voyeur, but from a bug's eye view,” Mark added.
Russ blinked — he had expected something like that but hearing it explicitly made him wonder just how much he knew Brad. There was something else tickling the back of his mind, the idea of seeing more of little Brad thrilled him.
“Okay… so he likes to watch. Got it.” He moved his hands down to his hips. “But it’s still dangerous, right?”
“You have no idea.” Mark said.
“Well look, why don’t you come hang out on the porch for a bit? Let me grab you some food and we can relax for a bit before you go back to find him. Hell, I can help look, if you need it,” Russ offered.
Mark nodded with a small grin — Russ was always so dependable. “Sure.”
“Attaboy.” Russ smiled reassuringly before leading Mark up the set of stairs to the back porch.
Mark followed along, not even noticing the distinct absence of the irritating buzzing that had been following him since yesterday evening.
---
Spiky little forelegs combed Brad’s new monstrous face as he completed the bug equivalent of licking his wounds after a random smack from his husband’s hand had clipped the buzzing fly-man and sent him reeling through the green of Russ’s verdant garden.
“He could have killed me!” Brad’s thoughts spiraled. “Could have mashed me like…like… a bug…”
Of course, he was a bug. Literally!
A droplet of water quivered on the vast red curve of one of Russ’s tomatoes. Directed back at Brad were dozens of tiny reflections of his new insect form.
His wings quivered even at rest, prepared to spring back into flight at a nano-second’s notice.
But he didn’t take flight.
He rested on the wide expanse that formed the top of one of Russ’s wooden tomato stakes providing support for a “Jack-and-the-beanstalk” tomato vine of enormous green tendrils and luscious red orbs. He rested, and worried.
What could he do? Mark wasn’t connecting the dots to form the pattern Brad needed.
Exhausted, mentally and physically, the transformed scientist watched as the distant giants remained fragmented into blurry, moving multiples of themselves.
As he watched them, Brad’s thoughts wandered back to the previous evening. When Mark had gotten ready for bed. Stripping off his clothes after hours of fruitless searching for his “missing” spouse.
A lust-crazed Brad had watched the entire strip show as a tiny bug voyeur from the flat surface of the bedside table. Tiny pads and hooks on his six legs now permitted him to land with perfect ease on vertical as well as horizontal surfaces, but he continued to act and react in human fashion and preferred landing on wide, flat and horizontal surfaces.
Before Brad realized what his colossal spouse was doing, Mark had eased into the bed and drew the covers up around his waist. Moments later, a hand ventured beneath the covers, which erupted into a fabric tidal wave of movement for a moment or so before settling down and leaving behind the outline of a frankly ginormous bulge impressed against the ivory fabric of the sheets.
“Oh, babe! If you knew what you were doing to me!” The horny fly flew over the vast desert of cloth, each fold looking like a rippling dune, to land atop the fabric-covered obelisk concealed beneath those fabric sands.
It was maddening to be so close, yet so far.
Brad spent the night there, eventually even dozing off there, although his husband’s monstrous erection had eventually subsided when Mark himself fell asleep fairly quickly.
Brad awakened first the next morning, disoriented for the few necessary seconds to recall that he had indeed become a tiny winged insect. It hadn’t been a bad dream.
He spent a few moments crawling over Mark’s vast muscled chest, weaving between the individual hairs in the thick pelt covering his spouse’s torso.
Mark must have felt him, because a hand lifted and lazily smacked at him before the enormous form yawned, stretched and sat up in bed.
Brad had flown toward the ceiling, aghast at the rude morning welcome that his husband had inflicted.
As his spouse got his day underway, Brad, faced with few options, followed him through their home, hoping the entire time that his husband would eventually return to the basement laboratory, open the door and re-admit Brad into the working environment of his lab.
He wasn’t a complete idiot, Brad reminded himself. Sure, he’d willingly transformed himself into a pesky bug, but he had made certain that he’d left the emitter set to generate a pulse of restorative energy every hour. That had been his fail-safe! All he needed to do to get back to his former self was to put himself in close proximity to the emitter during one of those brief bursts — something he couldn’t do from the other side of the monolithic lab door.
Was an action as mundane as shutting a door truly going to doom him?
He simply refused to accept that and kept buzzing in Mark’s wake as the titan walked through the colossal rooms of their home.
His spouse wandered to almost every room in the house except for the basement. After all, having already checked the lab, what reason would motivate him to return?
Brad continued to play voyeur through breakfast (oh, the incredible smells) as he watched Mark cook bacon and eggs.
“Now I see how you eat when I’m not looking over your shoulder,” Brad thought, knowing that Mark had gotten the “watch your cholesterol intake” lecture during his last checkup with his doctor.
But he was also thankful when Mark wandered from the kitchen, leaving a few smears of egg and crumbs of bacon on the plate.
A famished Brad had landed right on the egg residue and sucked up some of the remaining nutritious matter with his bizarre proboscis. The bacon, even more tempting, required him to puke some vile stomach acids onto the brittle morsel to semi-digest it enough for Brad to suck up the slurry with his proboscis.
He should have been, and he was slightly, nauseated by the fly’s grotesque table manners, but the taste of bacon must have been truly universal. He forgot all his squeamishness as he guzzled down a bacon smoothie.
Brad might very well have allowed his fly body to keep eating but he heard the sound of a distant waterfall and realized, correctly, that his husband was showering.
“More naked hubby,” Brad thought, abandoning the plate and zipping through the house.
He hoped Mark would eventually do what he needed him to do, but in the meantime the tiny insect figured he might as well enjoy himself.
Mark had already stepped into the shower, but his tiny husband perched on the sink countertop and watched Mark’s muscular, hairy form on the other side of frosted glass.
After the shower, his hands working a towel over his damp hair and wet body, Mark heard that damn buzzing again.
Brad encircled Mark’s head, weaving in and out of an erratic flight pattern.
“Please! Go to the basement!” Brad screamed wordlessly.
Instead, Mark’s irritation spiked, and he used the towel to snap a bolt of damp fabric at the blurry shape of the fly. He missed, but he gave Brad a horrible scare when the magnified sound of the towel snap brought back memories of muscular bullies in middle and high school locker rooms.
Lifting his face to the mirror, Mark had gotten a glimpse of his handsome form as the pesky blur of an insect flew away from him. After smiling and tearing his gaze away from the mirror, Mark made some half-hearted attempts to renew the search, but at this point he mostly tried to watch his step and count on Brad making some sort of effort to be found. Eventually he dressed and logged into his computer.
He didn’t even notice when a tiny fly landed on his shoulder as he checked email.
As he idled with the task at hand, Mark had looked through a bay window and saw a large black man in tight clothes. Their neighbor, and good friend, Russ had stepped out into his garden.
Mark decided that some company might be what he needed.
Brad, still perched on his shoulder, went along for the ride when Mark stepped outside the house and into Russ’s garden.
The tiny bug-guy overheard all their conversation, which mostly concentrated on his absence. From time to time, he alternated between Mark and Russ, buzzing each of them in a futile attempt to engage them.
All his pathetic actions got from the giants were some dangerous swats from massive hands and fingers.
When Mark sighed in loud frustration and expressed displeasure with his spouse’s reckless behavior, Brad buzzed him to set the record straight.
“I had everything under control until you shut the basement door!” Brad buzzed on his trembling wings, unwilling to take the blame for his dilemma.
“He likes to be unseen, like a voyeur, but from a bug's eye view,” Mark continued to fill in details for Russ.
“You have no idea!” Brad echoed and swooped toward his husband’s face only to get smacked by the hand of God.
His wings sputtered but somehow Brad managed to remain airborne, but the terrific smack had propelled him halfway across Russ’s garden.
With out-of-control momentum, his tiny fly form managed to make it all the way to the tall privacy barrier erected between Russ’s property and his other neighbors.
Brad’s keen senses picked up the heavy taste and smell (it was a sort of mutual blend as far as his fly body thought of these two senses) of coconut.
He buzzed over the top of the fence and flew down into a stylish, more manicured landscape surrounding a vast in-ground swimming pool. At the side of the pool, with his firm, muscled and nude body face down on a padded bench, Matteo Torres relaxed and prepared for a sun-bathing session at the poolside of his employers.
The 24-year-old man was between jobs at the moment and had responded to an advertisement for someone to tend the gardens and pool area of a successful, very upwardly mobile gay couple in their forties. Brad had met Paul and Ivan a few times, but he had never laid eyes on Matteo.
The couple had hired Matteo on the spot when he showed up in flip-flops, shorts, a tank-top, baseball cap and produced a winning smile as he rubbed his light beard with his fingertips as they fell all over themselves making introductions.
In the intervening weeks, Paul and Ivan had also invited Matteo to use the pool any time he wished.
Brad didn’t know those details. In fact, he didn’t know anything at all about the young man, but the fly was attracted to the coconut scent of Matteo’s sun tanning lotion and Brad was mesmerized by the twin mounds of Matteo’s naked butt on display as he hovered a few feet above him.
Figuring he could catch up with Mark and Russ, who were only a short distance beyond the fence, Brad flew closer, circling and lusting, before he landed on the right cheek.