Baby-Sized
An SPH Experience by ZTomInAustin.
They know I’m small.
Not “small” the way a guy says he’s small when he’s five and a half inches and feeling insecure after watching porn. Small the way a doctor would say it. Small the way a woman says it when she’s being honest and not polite. Small the way it actually means: under an inch soft, barely four and three-quarters hard, thin, with balls that look like they belong on a different body—two small, tight, barely-there ovals that sit so close to my groin they almost disappear when it’s cold.
How they know is a story I’ve told myself a thousand times, and each time it changes a little, the way memories do when they’ve been handled too much. But the core of it is this: I was young, I was stupid, and I trusted them, and they saw me, and they didn’t forget.
The first was Whitney. We’d been friends since college—freshman year, same dorm, same floor, the kind of friendship that forms when you’re eighteen and lonely, and someone across the hall has the same taste in music and the same bad habit of staying up too late. Whitney is tall—five-nine, maybe five-ten—with broad shoulders and a loud, barking laugh that you can hear across a crowded room. She played volleyball in college, and she still looks like she could—athletic, solid, the kind of woman who takes up space and doesn’t apologize for it. She’s not mean. She’s direct. There’s a difference, and it took me years to learn it.
The second was Caroline. Caroline is the opposite of Whitney in almost every way—small, soft, round, with dark, curly hair, glasses, and a voice that’s barely above a whisper. She’s a librarian, literally, and she looks like one. She became our friend junior year, when she and Whitney had a class together and started studying in the same coffee shop where I pretended to do work. Caroline is the quietest person I know, and also the most observant, and the combination of those two traits made her the most dangerous person to be naked in front of: she saw everything and said nothing, and the nothing was worse than anything she could have said.
The third was Tessa. Tessa came later—post-college, when we’d all moved to the same city by accident, the way people in their twenties do, chasing jobs and rent and the feeling that somewhere else might be better than where you are. Tessa is the prettiest of the three—not in a conventional way, not in a way that magazines would recognize, but in a way that makes you look twice and then a third time. She has red hair and freckles, a gap between her front teeth, and a body she dresses in a way that suggests she knows exactly what she has and doesn’t feel the need to prove it. She’s funny. She’s sharp. She’s the kind of woman who makes you want to be funnier and sharper when she’s in the room, and she’s the one who hurt me the most, though she didn’t know it at the time, and she still doesn’t know it, and I’ll never tell her.
—
I should explain how they know, because the how matters as much as the what.
It was Whitney first. Junior year, a party at someone’s off-campus house, too much cheap vodka, a game of truth or dare that started as a joke and became something else. The dare was simple—run around the house naked—and I was drunk enough to think it was funny, and I did it, and Whitney was on the porch when I came around the side, and she saw everything. Not a glance, not a peek—a full, front-on, well-lit view of me standing on the lawn with my pants around my ankles and my dick—my inch of dick—on display for anyone who cared to look.
She didn’t laugh. That’s what I remember most. She didn’t laugh, and she didn’t look away, and she didn’t make a face. She just looked. She looked at my crotch the way you’d look at a car that’s smaller than you expected—curiously, clinically, with a slight tilt of the head—and then she looked up at my face and said, “Okay, your turn. Get inside before someone calls the cops.”
She never mentioned it. Not that night, not the next day, not ever. But I saw something change in her eyes after that—a knowing, a familiarity, the look of someone who’s seen you naked and can’t unsee it. And I knew, in the way that you know things without evidence, that she’d filed it away. Not as a weapon. Not as ammunition. Just as a fact. A piece of information about me that she carried, the way she carried my birthday and my drink order and the name of my first dog.
Caroline found out differently. We were sharing a hotel room at a conference—both of us broke, both of us willing to split a room to save money—and I came out of the shower thinking she was downstairs at the bar. She wasn’t. She was sitting on her bed, reading, and the towel I’d grabbed was smaller than I thought. When I stepped out of the bathroom, the towel slipped, and I was exposed for two, maybe three seconds before I grabbed it and wrapped it back around my waist.
Three seconds. That’s all it takes. Three seconds for someone to see everything, to register what they’re seeing, to compare it to every other body they’ve seen, to file it in the appropriate category. Caroline looked up from her book, and her eyes went to my crotch, and her face did nothing—no expression, no reaction, nothing—and then she looked back down at her book and turned a page.
“Sorry,” I said, and my voice was a croak.
“It’s fine,” she said, and she turned another page, and that was it.
But it wasn’t it. Because Caroline, like Whitney, carried it. I could tell. The way she’d look at me sometimes when I was talking to a woman at a bar—the slight furrow of the brow, the almost imperceptible shake of the head. The way she’d change the subject when the conversation turned to sex, as if she was protecting me from something I couldn’t protect myself from. The way she once said, after a few drinks, that “size doesn’t matter to the right person,” and then caught herself and went quiet, and I knew she wasn’t speaking in generalities. She was speaking about me.
Tessa was different. Tessa found out because Whitney told her.
I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t know it for years. But Whitney—my friend, my close friend, the woman who’d seen me on the lawn and never mentioned it—had told Tessa, and Tessa had told Caroline, and the three of them had discussed my dick—my inch of dick, my barely-there nub, my baby-sized cock—the way friends discuss everything, which is to say thoroughly, honestly, and without mercy.
I found out because of a night—a birthday. Tessa’s birthday three years ago, at her apartment, all of us drunk on wine, sitting on her living room floor because she didn’t have enough chairs. The conversation turned to exes, as it does when wine is involved, and someone—I think it was Whitney—made a joke about a guy she’d dated who was “hung like a hamster,” and Tessa laughed and looked at me—not at Whitney, at me—and said, “We all know what that’s like, right?”
And I knew. In that instant, I knew. The way she looked at me, the way the other two went quiet, the way the word “all” hung in the air like a confession. They’d talked about me. They’d talked about my size. They’d shared it, compared it, analyzed it, the way women do when they’re alone and honest, and there’s a man in their lives who is smaller than any man they’ve ever been with.
I didn’t say anything. I laughed. I changed the subject. I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and stared at the wall and felt my face burn and my stomach drop and my dick—my inch of dick—shrink into itself, as if it could disappear entirely if it tried hard enough.
—
They knew. All three of them knew. And for years, it was fine.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t live like this. It was fine. They knew, and I knew they knew, and they knew I knew they knew, and we never talked about it, not directly, not explicitly. The friendship continued the way friendships continue—through dinners and movies and holidays and breakups and new jobs and all the ordinary machinery of life. The knowledge was there, under everything, like a foundation you build a house on. You don’t see it, but the house stands on it.
Whitney would sometimes say things—small things, offhand things—that I caught. Once, when I was dating a woman and told the group she seemed satisfied, Whitney said, “Satisfied is a strong word,” and then sipped her beer and said nothing else, and Caroline gave her a look, and Tessa stared at the table, and I sat there and felt the burn, low and constant, like a pilot light.
Caroline was gentler. Caroline never said anything that could be construed as a comment on my size. But she had a way of being kind that was worse than cruelty—a way of treating me like I was fragile, like I needed protection, like I was a man who’d been dealt a bad hand and deserved pity. She’d set me up on dates with her friends—nice women, quiet women, women she described as “not focused on physical stuff”—and I’d go on them and be charming, funny, and self-deprecating. The dates would go nowhere, and I’d come home and wonder if Caroline was screening these women for a specific quality, a specific tolerance, a specific willingness to overlook the thing that the three of them knew, and I couldn’t change.
Tessa was the worst, because Tessa was the one I wanted. Not in a romantic way—or not only in a romantic way—but in a physical, primal, gut-level way. She was beautiful, and she was my friend, and she knew I was small, and the combination of those three facts created a dynamic that I lived inside every day like a man lives inside a climate. I’d watch her across a table—her red hair, her freckles, the gap in her teeth when she smiled—and I’d think about what she knew. I’d wonder if she thought about it when she looked at me, and I’d wonder if she’d ever been with a man my size, and I’d wonder what she’d say if I asked her, and I’d never ask, because the answer would kill me.
It only burned me once. That’s what I said. That’s what I tell myself. It only burned me once, meaning there was only one time when the knowing became a fire instead of a pilot light, only one time when it consumed me instead of warming me in that sick, complicated way.
It was after my divorce.
I got married at thirty. Her name was Beth. She was nice. She was pretty. She was the kind of woman who said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t and “size doesn’t matter” when it did, and the marriage lasted four years. The ending was not about my size—or not only about my size—but my size was in the room when it ended, the way it’s in every room I’ve ever been in, sitting quietly in the corner, taking up less space than anything else but somehow filling the whole room.
Beth never said it. Never said the words. Never said “small,” “tiny,” “micro,” or any of the words I’d heard in my head a thousand times. But she’d go quiet during sex—quiet in a way that felt like absence, like she’d left her body and gone somewhere else, somewhere where the sex was different, where the man was different, where the thing inside her was big enough to make her stay. And she’d sigh afterward—not a satisfied sigh, not a contented sigh, but the sigh of someone who’s finished a task that was necessary but not enjoyable, like folding laundry or doing taxes—and she’d roll over and go to sleep. I’d lie there with my four and three-quarter inches wet with her and with me and feel the nothing that comes from being inside someone and not reaching them.
She left. She found someone else. I don’t know if he’s bigger—I assume he is, because the world assumes it. After all, the math assumes it. After all, why would you leave a man for another man who’s the same size?—but I don’t know, and I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell me, and the not-telling was its own answer.
The divorce was final on a Tuesday. I signed papers in a lawyer’s office, shook hands with a man I’d never met, walked out into a parking lot, sat in my car, and cried. Not because I loved her. Not because I missed her. Because I was alone again, and being alone meant dating, and dating meant getting naked, and getting naked meant the moment—the moment when a woman sees me for the first time, the moment when her face changes, the moment when the expectation meets the reality and the reality is smaller—and I wasn’t ready for that moment again. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready.
—
Three months after the divorce, I was on Facebook. I know. I know. Facebook is where hope goes to die, and I was scrolling through it at midnight with a glass of whiskey and the particular loneliness that comes from being recently divorced and knowing that everyone you know is paired up and you are not.
I was scrolling, and I saw Tessa’s face. A photo—her and two other women at a rooftop bar, sunglasses on, drinks in hand, the city behind them. Tessa looked good. Tessa always looked good. But my eye went to the woman next to her—one of the two friends in the photo, a woman I didn’t know. She was stunning. Dark hair, olive skin, a wide, full mouth, and a body that was visible even in a Facebook photo—curves, the kind that make you look twice and then a third time, the kind that I’d just described in my head as “the kind that make you want to be funnier and sharper when she’s in the room,” which was the same thing I’d thought about Tessa, which meant I was transferring, which meant I was desperate, which meant I was about to do something stupid.
I clicked on the photo. I looked at the woman. I looked at her for a long time—longer than I should have, longer than was healthy, longer than was dignified. Her name, according to the tag, was Simone. She was a friend of Tessa’s from work. She was single, according to her profile. She was beautiful, according to every photo I scrolled through. She was out of my league, according to every metric I’d ever internalized, but I was three months divorced and three glasses in, and the loneliness was a physical thing, a weight on my chest, and I thought: Tessa knows her. Tessa could set me up.
I texted Tessa the next day. A casual text—or what I tried to make casual, the kind of text that says “hey, no big deal, just wondering” while your heart pounds in your chest and your thumb hovers over the send button for thirty seconds before you press it.
“Hey, who’s the girl in your Facebook photo? The one with the dark hair. She’s gorgeous. Set me up?”
I waited. I put the phone down. I picked it up. I put it down again. I walked around my apartment. I looked out the window. I looked at the phone. I did all the things you do when you’ve asked a question you’re not sure you want answered.
She replied in an hour. Maybe less. It felt like a year.
—
The text was short. Three sentences. I’ve memorized them the way you memorize a song lyric or a prayer—not because you want to, but because the words got inside you and set up camp and refused to leave.
“No way. She loves them big. Not baby-sized like you.”
I read it on my couch. I read it standing in the kitchen. I read it in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet the way I sit on the toilet—pants down, dick pointing into the bowl, the way a man sits when he doesn’t have enough to hold. I read it in bed, with the phone six inches from my face, the blue light illuminating the darkness and the words burning into my retinas.
No way.
Two words that closed a door. Two words that said: you are not among the men who are introduced to women like Simone. You are in a different category—a smaller category, a category with fewer members, a category that Tessa knew about because she’d been told by Whitney, who’d seen me on a lawn at twenty, and who’d shared the information with her friends the way you share a recipe or a recommendation, and the information had traveled through the group and settled into the collective knowledge like sediment at the bottom of a river, and now it was being used—not cruelly, not intentionally, but practically, the way you use any information, to make decisions, to sort people, to decide who goes where.
She loves them big.
Four words that described Simone’s preference. Not a judgment—an observation. Tessa wasn’t saying I was bad. She wasn’t saying I was less. She was saying that Simone had a preference, and I didn’t meet it, and there was no point in pretending. It was the same thing as saying “she’s vegetarian, don’t take her to a steakhouse”—practical, honest, a simple matching of person to preference. Except the preference was about my body, about the part of my body that I couldn’t change, about the part that defined me in ways I’d spent my whole life trying to deny.
Not baby-sized like you.
Five words. Five words that did the damage. Five words that took the knowing—the quiet, private, unspoken knowing that had lived between us for years—and dragged it into the light. Five words that said, “I know what you have.” I’ve always known. And it’s not enough. Not for Simone. Not for anyone who loves them big. Not for anyone who wants a man and not a boy, a cock and not a nub, something to feel and not something to look for.
Baby-sized. Not small. Not tiny. Not even micro, which is what Jillian would have said, which is what the clinical word is, which is what a doctor would write on a chart. Baby-sized. The word Tessa chose—not “small,” “tiny,” or “micro,” but “baby-sized”—was the one that broke me, because it wasn’t just about size. It was about development. It was about maturity. It was about the implication that I was a man who’d stopped growing in a place that mattered, that I was adult in every way except the one that counted, that what I had between my legs was not a man’s cock but a baby’s penis, unchanged since birth, untouched by puberty, a thing that belonged in a diaper and not in a woman.
—
I didn’t reply for two days. Two days of staring at the text, of reading it and rereading it, of putting my phone in a drawer and taking it out again, of typing responses and deleting them, of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling and hearing Tessa’s voice in my head saying the words in a tone I’d never heard her use—casual, matter-of-fact, the tone of someone stating a fact so obvious it barely needed saying.
I typed a hundred replies. “Ouch.” “That’s harsh.” “Thanks for being honest.” “I didn’t realize you’d discussed my dick with your friends.” “Fuck you, Tessa.” “You’re right.” “I know.” “I’m sorry I asked.”
I deleted all of them.
What I finally sent was: “Ha, fair enough.”
Two words. Three syllables. The universal response of a man who’s been gut-punched and is trying to smile through the blood. Ha, fair enough. As if it were a joke. As if she’d said something clever about my haircut or my shoes. As if the words “baby-sized like you” hadn’t just confirmed every fear I’d ever had about my body and my worth and the way the women in my life—the women who knew me, who loved me, who’d seen me at my worst and stayed—actually saw me when the honesty came out.
She replied with a heart emoji. A heart. As if the conversation were over. As if the wound were closed. As if “baby-sized” were a minor inconvenience, a small thing—ha—a detail, the kind of thing you mention and move on from, the way you’d say “she’s tall, you’re short, it won’t work.”
I put the phone down. I went to the bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and pulled down my pants and looked at myself—my inch of dick, my barely-there nub, my baby-sized cock—and I thought about Simone, with her dark hair and her wide mouth and her preference for big. I thought about Tessa, who knew me and loved me and had said the truest thing anyone had ever said to me. I thought about Beth, who’d left without saying it but had meant it all the same. I thought about Whitney on the porch, Caroline in the hotel room, and the three of them on Tessa’s living room floor, talking about me, comparing me, filing me into the category where I’d always been and would always be.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked at the thing between my legs—the thing that had shaped my life more than my education, my career, or my personality, the thing I’d built my entire identity around hiding, protecting, and compensating for—and I felt the burn. Not the pilot light. The fire. The full, consuming, all-encompassing fire of a man who has been told, in plain language, by someone he trusts, that he is not enough. That he is baby-sized. That the women who know him best know this and have always known this and will always know this, and that the knowing is not a secret they keep but a fact they carry, lightly, the way you carry anything that doesn’t weigh much.
Because it doesn’t weigh much. To them. It’s a detail. A footnote. A thing they mention over wine, a thing they use to decide who to set up with whom, a thing that falls into the same category as height, hair color, or job title—a characteristic, a data point, a line on a profile. Nice guy. Funny. Baby-sized. Not a match for Simone.
To me, it’s everything. It’s the mirror I look in every morning. It’s the stall I wait for. It’s the towel I hold tighter. It’s the reason I sit to pee and the reason I don’t change in locker rooms and the reason I married a woman who said “it’s fine” when it wasn’t. It’s the word that lives under every other word I speak and every move I make and every relationship I build, the foundation that no one sees but that holds up the whole house.
Baby-sized. That’s what Tessa said. That’s what she meant. And the worst part—the part that burns, the part that won’t stop burning—is that she was right.
—
I saw Simone again. On Facebook. In another photo. With a man. Tall, broad, the kind of man who takes up space in a photo the way Simone takes up space in a photo. His hand was on her waist, her head on his shoulder, and they were at the same rooftop bar, the city behind them. I looked at his crotch—not visible, not visible at all, hidden behind jeans like mine—but I looked anyway, and I imagined what was there, and I imagined Simone’s face when she saw it for the first time, and I imagined the sound she made, and I imagined the difference between that moment and the moment she would have had with me—the moment of seeing, the moment of realizing, the moment of adjusting expectation to match reality—and I closed the app and put the phone down and sat in the dark and felt the burn.
Tessa and I are still friends. The three of them—Whitney, Caroline, Tessa—are still my closest friends, still my people, still the ones I call when things are good and when things are bad. We had dinner last week. Tessa brought a new coworker—not Simone, someone else—and she introduced me as “a good friend,” and the coworker smiled and shook my hand, and I was charming and funny and self-deprecating, and the dinner was fine, and the night was fine, and everything was fine.
But when Tessa hugged me goodbye—her arms around my neck, her cheek against mine, the smell of her shampoo and the warmth of her body—I felt it. The knowing. The thing between us. The word she’d typed on a Tuesday afternoon while I sat in my apartment, waiting for a reply that would change nothing and confirm everything.
Baby-sized like you.
She hugged me, let go, smiled, I smiled, and we said goodnight. I walked to my car and sat in the driver’s seat and didn’t start the engine and stared at the steering wheel and thought about the word and the text and the photo and Simone and the man in the photo and the rooftop bar and the city behind them and the life that was happening somewhere else, with someone else, with a body that was different from mine in the one way that mattered.
Baby-sized. That’s what I am. That’s what they know. All three of them. And they’ll always know. And I’ll always know they know. And the knowing will sit between us, quiet and permanent, like a stone at the bottom of a river, too heavy to move, too deep to see, but always there. Always there.
The End.
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