Selma froze as she looked at what was laying in her bed. She lived alone.  She lived painfully alone. Most days she expected little more than to come home from her job exhausted and flop into her bed. It was almost perfectly pathetic that the bed was a Murphy bed, the sort that folds up into the wall and out of the way because your apartment is so laughably small. But today that bed was not empty. Today that bed was occupied by what might have been the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. His clothes were in a pile beside the bed, clearly shed hastily. This left him with nothing but his bronze skin and his tousled blond hair. There was something overtly drunken about the way he was laying there. Maybe it was because she’d only left her door unlocked for five minutes while she went to get her laundry, and thus he would have had to show up and pass out in that time. Maybe it was that he’d chosen to do so on a bed that had no sheets on it, as those were the things she’d fetched from the laundry room. Maybe it was that he’d completely shed his clothes and was sleeping naked on her bare bed.

She stepped forward and went to nudge him awake, but she paused. She was such a mousy, unconfident girl, this was probably as close as she was ever likely to get to such a stunning example of the male anatomy. She crept up until she was leaning against the bed, then reached out her hand to touch his thigh.

It was just as firm and muscular as she’d dreamed it would be. Next she found herself edging around the side of the bed to give herself a long awaited taste of his abs. They were perfectly chiseled, rising and falling slowly as he slept.

She released a shaky breath and wondered if he was out cold enough for her to maybe sneak a kiss. She glanced up to his face and found, to her shock and dismay, that his eyes were open.

“Can I help y--” he began.

She replied with a squeal and, without thinking, grabbed the edge of the bed and heaved it upward. The bed folded up against the wall and struck with a meaty slap. For a moment, there was stillness as she slowly came to terms with what she’d done.

“Oh my gosh I knocked him out.” She breathed.

The bed shuddered. Her discovery that he had, in fact, not been knocked cold, produced not relief but panic. Rather than pulling the bed open again and apologizing, she threw her weight against it and shoved. The bed eased slowly shut with an odd, rubbery sound, until the latch that secured it finally clicked.

“... What did I just do?” she squeaked. “And what am I going to do now? What do I do? Open it up and apologize? What reason could I possibly give for having that reaction. Then again, he was trespassing in my home. I had the right to defend myself. … But who defends themselves with a Murphy Bed?”

She took a deep breath.

“It’s fine. It’ll be fine. I’ll just open it back up, apologize, and everything will be fine.”

She unlatched the bed and expected it to spring open. It did not. She had to pull it down just like she did every evening. When she did, she watched through half squinted eyes, expecting to see a bruised and confused young man. He wasn’t there. She looked at the mattress, confused. Then crawled on top of it to see if he’d somehow fallen between the bed and the wall. As she looked down, she heard an odd peeling sound and felt something warm and smooth drape over her head.

Selma tore it from her head and threw it down, scrambling backward in yet another fresh wave of panic. It landed in a floppy wad on the bed in front of her, and it took a long time before she recognized that it was the same rich bronze color of his skin. She slid from the bed and gingerly tugged the shape this way and that. Gradually it unraveled and spread. When it was fully unfurled there was no denying it. This floppy mat was the very man she’d been shocked to find not two minutes ago. His body was creased a bit, but aside from being maybe a millimeter thick, he looked just as he had when he had this third dimension. His eyes were half lidded, his face stuck in a muzzy look of having just awoken.

Not knowing what else to do, she leaned forward to start smoothing out his wrinkles.  While she rubbed him this way and that, she rehearsed the apology she would say when she figured out how to get him back to normal. As she ran her hands over his smooth body, those thoughts started to fall away. There was something so delightful about the soft yielding springiness of what had become of his flesh. When he was entirely smoothed out, she saw that he’d barely been distorted at all by the compression. He was just as hot and gorgeous as before. From directly above she could almost convince herself it was the same, full thickness man.

Almost without thinking, she found herself crawling up onto the bed. Her hands and knees pressed down on his flattened form, dimpling it into the bed. He quivered and wriggled subtly at her touch. She leaned low, her face close to his. Before she could change her mind, she pressed her lips to his flattened face. It was so warm… so alive…

A knock at the door snapped her out of her near-trance.

“Selma? You in there?”

“Y-yeah!” she called.

It was the landlord.

“Apparently there was some male model or something who wandered into our building after doing some sort of photo shoot? His handlers are here and they said he might have been under the influence of something?”

“I haven’t seen anyone!” she shouted.

“The surveillance tape had him stumbling into your apartment. I’ve got to come in and take a look.”

Her eyes widened as she heard him jingling his keys. Her heart leapt to her throat. The size wasn’t the only awful thing about the apartment. Her landlord acted like he owned the place. … Well, he did own the place, but he had no respect for privacy. He’d come barging in regardless of if she told him to stop or not. And when he came in, he’d see what had become of the stranger.

She quickly snatched the fitted sheet and, with a few deft tucks, slipped it onto the mattress with the flattened man still beneath it. She finished just in time for the door to open. The landlord poked his head in.

“They’re making a big deal about it. I’ve got to look around,” he said.

“F-fine, but he’s not in here,” she said, failing pitifully in her attempt to play it cool.

The landlord looked around the apartment, peeking behind curtains and looking in closets. After 5 minutes of searching didn't turn anything up, he gave up.

“Well I guess he must have jumped out the window or something,”  the landlord said.

“I guess so,” Selma said, her relief as poorly hidden as her earlier concern.

The landlord let himself out. Selma glanced at the bed. A model. She should have known he was a model. No one was as gorgeous as he was without making a living at it. She reached for the sheet to pull it free. Maybe she could… what, drop him off at a clinic and drive away? What could she seriously do with her flattened man?

She paused. Her flattened man. For now, at least, that what he was, wasn’t he? Helplessly, almost inanimately hers. Laid out in her bed. Waiting for her. A male model, all to herself.

She double checked the door was locked, then shed her clothes. At first, she simply slid into bed, feeling for the warm, slightly firmer outline of the man beneath. She rubbed herself on the sheet, shutting her eyes and trying to drink in the sensation of the trapped plaything. But before long, that wasn’t nearly enough. She slipped from bed and slid him out from beneath the sheet. Even the brief time trapped, pinned under her own body, had made him warm and just a bit moist with a light sheen of perspiration. Coupled with the smoothness of his skin, it made him look almost glossy. She draped him over her arm long enough to fix the sheet, then crawled into bed, gave his flattened form a flick, and let him flutter down over her. He flopped down and conformed to her body, caressing her like a silk sheet. She held him tight against her, running her hands firmly over him and practically mashing him into her own curves. Gradually she felt her pulse begin to quicken. She wadded his groin up a bit and, blushing, slid it between her thighs…

~~~

An hour or so later, a somewhat disheveled Selma was back in the laundry room with a heavy basket. She glanced about, then started to heft the basket up and dump the contents inside. It was a mixed load, some towels, some socks, and for the sharp-eyed, a brief glimpse of fleshtone.