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Steven had never been very good at phone calls. They weren’t the same as being in person, not even with video. There was so much missing, so many little nuances in body and glances and expressions that video flattened. So, he talked to Connie on his diplomatic missions, but it wasn’t really the same.
When a stretch of months passed, hopping from planet to planet, he found himself feeling very alone. Very old. Very grown up. Everything was responsibility and negotiation and the awful weight of gem lives hanging over his head. It was supposed to be over, but there was always another planet to save. Another place that wasn’t Earth.
They talked about her school and his mission. She kept him updated on shows and good fanfic and the best fan art. He kept her updated on gempire progress. Sometimes they talked about work, where he and her had very long, very intense, very focused talks on saving the galaxy. Sometimes they talked about nothing, and she would remark, “I think you’re getting taller” and he would ramble to tell her everything he could think of to the point that she would giggle and laugh and tell him to slow down. “I need to take notes to keep up,” she said.
But what was important was that finally he was getting a break to come home, and it was right at the beginning of Connie’s summer break. They’d have days together, completely uninterrupted. If the past was anything to go on, they’d have the nights too. He was already fantasizing about the perfect sleepover, desperate to prove he could keep up with anything her high school friends were doing.
He had everything planned perfectly.
And then he warped back to his home and instantly heard a “Steven!” and arms flung around him and he realized that, no, he didn’t have anything planned well at all. He was going to meet her at her house with a bag of junk food and a box of donuts, but she was in his greenhouse with her arms wrapped tight around him, and he didn’t know why he had thought there could be anything else. Connie was always there for him.
He hugged her back with a giddy giggle, squeezing her tight so they both hummed with happiness. He noticed that he could rest his head on her shoulder, and she could rest her head on his. That was nice and there was a flash of pride and excitement in knowing he was finally Connie’s height. He was growing, just like she was.
Well, maybe not just like she was. Because he couldn’t help but notice the smallness of her. He had never associated Connie with small before. She was taller than him and as they had grown she’d filled out. Her muscle had made her broader than a lot of the other girls he’d seen around town. Connie was not a small girl by any stretch.
But he was becoming a big boy.
He’d been as broad as her when he had been half her height and now that he could look her in the eye without tilting his head, he found that the bulk of him dwarfed her. She vanished into his arms, his body giving way as she melted into his softness. When had that happened? She couldn’t have shrunk, so he must have gotten big.
As he pulled back with a nervous laugh he wondered what that meant. Was he too big? He knew that sometimes people were scared of big people, and big muscley people were even scarier. Could she feel how strong he was? Most of it was magic. He hoped it wasn’t intimidating. He hoped the fat was okay. He wasn’t sure why it would bother her, or why it would bother anyone, but he knew it could, and he had never been a skinny kid.
Connie beamed at him. “You’re still growing! Look at you!”
“You too!” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true. Was she growing? Was she just growing slower? When in the world had small become a word for Connie Maheswaran, the girl who could carry him on her back, or bridal style in her arms?
...Could she still do that?
She put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay? You seem a little in your head.”
Steven shook it off with a smile. “Yeah. It’s alright! Just been awhile since I’ve been on Earth. Did you bring all your stuff for a sleepover?”
“I have brought everything I need for a full week of fun,” she said with a wink, and he followed after her like a puppy to his own house.
Connie’s plans were extensive, and he watched in lovestruck awe as Connie carefully made crossouts and color coded highlights and rewrote her schedule so his half-baked plans melded seamlessly in with hers. It would have taken him hours to sort all that out, but it came so naturally to her. She might’ve been tiny but she had the biggest brain.
He tried not to flush at that. He tried not to blush every time those thoughts cropped up, which seemed to happen more and more. Steven loved cute things, and there was something about the realization that Connie was small compared to him that just threw his brain for a loop. Everytime he stared at the frame of her, or held some piece of her clothing in his hand, his brain tingled with adorableness as he thought, She’s so tiny!
Of course, it was a bit of a double edged sword. As fun as it might have been to think about how cute Connie was, she was only tiny compared to the hugeness of him. Plenty of people were noticing just how big he was. Like his dad, who clapped him on the back with a grin and said, “I think you might wind up being bigger than your old man, schtu-ball!”
Or how Amethyst giggled as she threw her arms around him and Connie and teased, “So much for the shorty squad, huh guys?”
And being big was odd in a lot of ways. Because first, there was fatness. That was something that had never been a bother before, because as someone who had never gone to school, there were no kids to mock and shame him for his size. Steven was fat and that was no worse than being thin.
It was different now, though, because he was older, and because Connie set his heart fluttering, and because he was thinking about what it meant to be handsome. Steven knew what attractiveness was. It was broad shoulders and chest, which he had, but it was supposed to narrow at the hips. It was thick muscle, which he had, but that muscle wasn’t supposed to be hidden under softness. Even now, there was no shame in his body, no hate for it.
But there was worry.
And that worry about being hot compounded with the other problem with his size. He was strong. His bigness belayed the truth to the power of him, which had once been hidden with a child’s frame and a baby face. Now there was a hesitation from new women he met, the slightest touch of suspicion and concern when he struck up a conversation out of the blue, or offered to guide them to wherever they needed to go.
“You’re turning into a man, bud,” Greg said tenderly. ‘You know you’re… listen, even without your magic, wrestling with Connie has been getting easier, right? You have to be careful not to hurt her?” Steven nodded reluctantly, and Greg ruffled his hair. “You’ve got a lot of testosterone, and people without it get a little nervous. They know you’re strong enough to hurt them.”
He laughed at the idea. “I’m Steven.”
No laugh returned. “But they don’t know that.”
So he was sad about that. He had the downside of muscles, of strength, with none of the upsides of conventional attractiveness. And as much as he wished that he could go out and talk to people and find reassurance among the public, he already had that in the gems. The problem, the worry, was that he was in love with the smallness of his best friend, and she might not have felt the same about the bigness of him.
He attempted in his awkward, teenagery way, to remedy the situation as they sat alone in his greenhouse, her studying and him reading a book in the humid, comfy place. “You know, I really like small girls. Cute girls.”
“Oh,” Connie said, and he noticed the way her eyes drifted over her body. A sudden stiffness and tightness came over her, her voice forcibly cheery as she continued, “That’s cool. Me too. Cute girls are pretty great.”
Right. Connie was only small in that he was big. Oops. He scrambled to fix it. “I mean! Most girls are small to me. You’re small. I like feeling all big and strong and protective. So, I like it when girls are smaller than me.” Tension eased from her and he asked, “Um, what about you? With guys?”
She glanced at him, slowly raising an eyebrow. He felt heat spread over his face as she drawled, “Well, I guess if one of my guy friends had a sudden growth spurt, I’d be alright with it.”
He covered his face with his hands. “Great. Cool. Thank you.”
She slid closer to him, voice teasing as she tugged his hands down. “And I guess I’d be really interested in how he was always so tiny and he’s not anymore, and I’d really like that. Even though I’m really strong and one of the tallest girls in my class, my best friend in the one person in the world who makes me feel small in a good way, and really safe, and I really like how hugging him feels like a giant pillow.”
He was sure he had the stupidest, silliest grin on his face as he rubbed the back of his neck. He couldn’t stop his cheeks from burning from her teasing smile, the glint in her eyes that appeared every time she’d outmaneuvered him in a talk. “And, um, the fact that he’s superstrong and really big and beats you all the time in wrestling isn’t scary?”
“Oh, Steven. No,” she said softly. Her face went tender as she took his hand. “Never. Sometimes it’s frustrating, because I want to be really strong, but you’re never scary. You’re Steven. I know you’d never hurt me.”
He swallowed, because that was wonderful, and it was all he needed to know, but there was something he still wanted to hear. “I’m gonna ask something weird, and you don’t have to answer, okay? You can just say you don’t wanna say.”
“Go ahead.” She beamed.
There was no one there, but he whispered in her ear anyway as if they were in a crowded room, “Do you think I’m hot even though I’m fat?”
When he pulled back, Connie was biting her lip. Embarrassment was all over her face as her eyes shifted away, suddenly unable to meet his gaze at all. Her head moved in the smallest possible nod, and as if to deflect from the idea of her feelings being about him, she whispered, “I always thought linebackers were the most good looking. Big, blocky guys are really, um, sexy.”
He grinned. Yeah. That’d work just fine.