Standing on the coffee table in the living room, Steve had barely absorbed Melissa's words before he found himself shakily turning away from her looming, grinning face and running off towards the far end of the table. He didn't know where he was going; he didn't know what he was going to do once he got to the table's edge, which was the same thing as the sheer end of a 60-foot cliff from the perspective of his 5-inch stature. What was he going to do? Jump!? Steve had no idea. All he knew was that he had to flee, had to get as far away from Melissa as possible...because clearly, she had completely lost her mind.
Before he could reach the edge of the table, though, he suddenly felt a gentle but indomitable pressure on his right leg as he kicked it back in a running motion, and just like that, he was brought to a complete stop. In a helpless panic, he glanced backwards and saw that Melissa had casually reached out her hand and grabbed his lower leg in between her thumb and forefinger. She hadn't moved from her sitting position next to the coffee table; all she had done was reach her hand out to grab him. And that grin on her face, together with her wide, excited eyes, and the ruby-red curve of her lips as she licked them with her pink tongue, drove Steve into a frenzy of terror that he had never experienced before.
"Melissa...Melissa, no...no please..." he began, not even able to muster up the momentum to raise his voice because of the tightness in his chest, "Y-You...you can't..."
"I can't...what?" she smiled playfully, sticking her tongue out to the side of her mouth and biting it. "Eat you? Come on, Steve...look at you! Look at how small you are! You're smaller than a hot dog. Of course I can eat you!"
"B-But...but no, you can't..." he panted, hopping up and down on his left leg as he tried desperately to free himself from her grasp. "Melissa...this is crazy talk...you're just playing around. You're just...you're just trying to scare me."
"Haha if I was trying to scare you I'd just do this," Melissa chuckled, and suddenly her eyes went even wider, crazily wide, like she truly had lost her mind, as her mouth dropped abruptly open into a gaping black cavern, her nostrils flaring with aggressive hunger.
"rrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAUUUUUGHGHHHH!!" she growled, starting softly but quickly crescendoing into a loud, vicious snarl as she suddenly thrust her head forward, the gaping hole of her open mouth bearing down on Steve from the sky with terrifying pace. He collapsed in a crumpled heap on the table, holding his hands up to his face as he screamed. From his perspective, it was like a huge, 20-story building was about to fall on him and swallow him up all at the same time.
And then, just as suddenly as she had changed her face before, Melissa's expression softened back into a playful, loving smile, with her cheeks flushed rosy from the effort of snarling a moment before.
"See?" she giggled, letting his leg go as she proceeded to drum her fingers on the table around his body, sending thudding waves of vibration through him, "You're soooo easy to scare, Steve -- and it's because you're so tiny compared to me!" She swiftly put up the two pillars of her forearms in front of him, crossing them into a triangle shape that she used to support her chin as she leaned down, licking her lips again. "That's why it's going to be a cinch to eat you."
"But you...c-can't eat me," Steve breathed, his voice shaking as he rose unsteadily back to his feet. "I'll...I'll die!"
"Oh my goodness," Melissa sighed, rolling her eyes, "Weren't you listening to me before, Steve? I just made sure to cover you from head to toe with an amorphous polypropylene-augmented phenolic-based coating...you just absorbed it through every bit of your skin, and I even made you swallow some too, just to be safe."
Steve stood there, blinking cluelessly even as his body shook in fear. Melissa had clearly expected him to understand the significance of what she had just said, so several silent seconds passed by before she added:
"You know? Phenolic coating that will completely shield you from the hydrochloric acid in my stomach? And the spiked polypropylene augmentation to maintain the coating's stability despite my body's high internal temperature? Come on Steve, I know you weren't a science major, but still..."
Steve was shaking his head, his mouth open. He was unable to say anything more right now...she had to be joking, right? This was surely just one of Melissa's elaborate little mind games that she enjoyed playing with him. But that excited gleam in her wide eyes, and the genuine tone of her voice...they were stirring dark and foreboding fears within him. With a sickening lurch in his own stomach, he thought back to all the days previously, of Melissa testing all these different pills and solutions and concoctions on herself, all while being knowingly, smirkingly furtive about what she was doing whenever Steve had asked her. This was what she had been doing, been planning for. It didn't seem real; it didn't seem like Melissa, for all her craziness, would ever do something like this to him. But he didn't have more time for incredulity, because she was lowering her face down at him again, this time more slowly, with a deliberate and voluptuous precision that terrified him.
"I know what you're thinking, Steve," she murmured down at him softly, her voice strikingly gentle despite her professed intentions. "You're scared...and you can't believe that this is about to happen. But it's happening, Steve. And I need you to trust me. You're not going to get hurt...at all. That solution that you absorbed will keep you completely safe...all the way through me."
"All...the way...through!?" Steve gulpled.
"Mhmmmmmm," Melissa purred, nodding slowly as her eyes slow-blinked in affection. "I'm going to swallow you, Steve...aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh" -- and here she opened her huge mouth at him and stuck out her tongue, pointing straight down the dark hole. "And then I'm going to swallow again and again, massaging your body with my powerful esophageal musclessssss..." -- and she began to trace a line down her neck -- "Before splllloooosshhh! You land in my stomach! And then sloooooop! You'll get sucked down my pylorus into my small intestine, whoop...whoop..." -- She began tracing the squiggly lines of her intestines sideways down the middle of her abdomen -- "And after that long ride you'll drop into my large intestine and go aaaaaall the way up around me like this!" -- Her finger traced up the side of her torso again, going around in a box shape -- "Before I pop you out of my ass at the end!"
"Y-You're...going to poop me out!?" Steve cried.
"Poop?" Melissa laughed, making a face, "Augh! Gross! No, Steve...I've been doing that juice fast for the last three days! I'm all cleaned out! You have nothing to worry about!"
"But h-how..how am I gonna breathe!?" he asked. None of this made any sense...there was just no way.
"Oh...you'll manage just fine," she replied nonchalantly. "You'll see."