Jump to content

Staircase Summit


Chickenshack

Recommended Posts

-and in other news the recent-“ CLICK went the TV as it was turned off, ushering in a sudden silence that left the lone occupant of the living room it was located in with a feeling of lukewarm reluctance.

Erica sighed. She would have stayed indoors watching television all day if she could but she had an important presentation that she had to give at work that day. Heaving herself off of her sofa with a disdainful grunt, she made her way to the kitchen table to make sure she had everything she needed in order to be in her best form. Pulling up two chairs, she gave herself plenty of room between the table and the seats and plopped down atop the both of them, trying her best to distribute her weight evenly between the two. Reaching into a tin of cookies that had taken up permanent residence on the tabletop, she munched quietly while she took inventory of the items she had laid out in front of her the night before.

Portfolio, check.

Charts and diagrams, check.

Laser pointer, check.

Flash drive… Where the hell had Erica put her flash drive?! Turning her head to and fro, she rifled through her purse while trying to retrace her steps. She swore she had had it before dinner the previous night… and she had still seen it on the table later on when she was still feeling peckish… and she knew for a fact that it was still there when she had gone down for her midnight snack!

Erica’s heart was starting to beat faster. That flash drive was the most important item out of all the ones she needed! It had her powerpoint presentation on it, her excel spreadsheet, her slideshow… there’s no way she could be that careless!

No way she could be that careless. It suddenly dawned on Erica what might have happened to the dire little piece of plastic and metal.

Digging her phone out of her purse, she pressed Number 2 on the speed dial. The number for her husband.

It only rang twice before he picked up. “Hey babe,” Erica could hear from the other end, “what’s up?”

“Yea, hey,” Erica started, the urgency and stress in her voice apparent even through the phone call, “did you borrow my flash drive again? I need it for today!”

“Ohhh… Oh shit,” she heard him say. Now her heart sank.

Please please please don’t tell me you took it with you to work!” Erica begged him. Gawd, why did it have to be today of all days? Her husband Darryl only worked one day a week and, of course, it was today. She silently cursed him for taking that stupid job in the first place…

All it was was a one-semester stint at the local community college teaching music theory to bored teenagers and young adults looking for an easy elective for their transcripts. It wasn’t like the job was dangerous or demeaning in any way, it was just… not like they needed the money.

Darryl had had a mildly successful singing and acting career up until his early twenties and hadn’t really worked in almost a decade; he was able to provide just fine for his wife off of collecting royalties, making guest appearances at conventions and the occasional television cameo. Not that Erica needed a provider, though.

Erica had always been the actual breadwinner of the two, an u-and-comer climbing her way up the corporate ladder in the cutthroat world of financing. Her yearly salary was already more than enough to cover a quite lavish lifestyle for the two, capitulated with the large two-story home she had bought for the two of them when they had gotten married.

No, Darryl had gotten this job because he wanted to feel a “sense of purpose” in life after “not being relevant” for the past eight or so years. It made Erica want to roll her eyes. He was being so melodramatic for someone who hadn’t even come close to turning forty yet.

And now this! Erica was almost fuming now, trying her best to keep her voice steady as she held back tears of frustration. This presentation could make or break her entire career…

“Darryl, honey,” she seethed, “I need you to get back here with my flash drive. I need to leave for work. Now,” she iterated.

“Umm, I don’t- Siobhan, put that baton down NOW! I don’t have it with me, honey,” she heard from the other end. “I didn’t bring it with me, I just needed to transfer some sick MP4s that I wrote last night. It should be.. oh shit.”

“Oh shit what?!” Erica demanded.

“I’m pretty positive I left it plugged in. Up in the studio.”

Erica hung up without another word, face overcast with gloom. Why did her husband have to be so stupid?

To be fair, Darryl was an extraordinarily handsome, well-meaning man and any woman would consider herself lucky to have him locked down, especially a woman like Erica, but…. suffice it to say, she hadn’t married the man for his brains. Looking to calm her nerves, she reached back into her cookie tin, taking several this time and jamming them into her mouth unceremoniously as she tried to use the sugar rush to take her mind off of the ordeal that she was about to have to undergo.

Darryl’s “studio” in question was the special room he had set up in the house to record his perpetually in-the-works “comeback album”. Erica hadn’t actually been in that room in years. It wasn’t that Darryl didn’t allow her in there; on the contrary, he would have been ecstatic if his wife, his muse as he called her, were willing to sit in on a recording session. The problem with that was that the studio had slowly become more and more inaccessible to Erica as the years had gone by.

The reason for that was actually pretty simple: Darryl had built his studio on the second floor, and one look at Erica’s two-chair physique would make it obvious to anyone that that was going to present a bit of an obstacle for her.

Erica was absurdly, morbidly overweight. The young, corpulent corporate cutie hadn’t always been super-fat. Sure, she had been fat for pretty much her entire life, but never this fat. Her professional-looking business attire was custom-tailored to be ludicrously oversized in order to accommodate her vast, billowing curves and yet each and every article of clothing was straining to cover and contain her bulging body.

The buttons on her smart black blazer failed to meet even at the top thanks to her relatively small albeit watermelon-sized breasts, whereas her matching black trousers were hardly faring any better. Her two-chair ass was so wide and stuck out so far that she was beginning to hear the seams of her size forty-fours popping on the sides, and her large, lardy legs felt absolutely constricted all the way down to her calves. Even the brooch that she had wanted to wear had been cutting into her third chin too deeply, so she had had to take it off.

But if there was any sure sign that Erica was a bit too big for her outfit, it was the massive, domineering midsection she possessed and the absurd amount of pressure it was applying to her tortured work blouse. It sprawled out in every direction, although clearly showing its front as its main priority; the ginormous, jiggling mound of fat extended so far out that it surged past the girl’s knees by a good few inches. Although Erica certainly had breasts and booty to spare, her belly put the two to shame, dominating her appearance and punishing the buttons of her overworked blouse with every exhalation. There were diamonds of fleshy fat bulging through the gaps in between the buttons, and the fact that the blouse was even holding together at all was a true testament to the durability of the fabric.

So large was her stomach, in fact, that any passerby would have to wonder how she had even managed to button her blouse on her own in the first place. And the truth is, she hadn’t; her husband had done it for her before he left that morning. She had had to suck in the entire time, squeezing her enormous tummy in as far as she could, which wasn’t very far at all, while Darryl did the buttons up as deftly and quickly as he could, having to muster his strength to stretch the silky material over the apex of her jutting belly. Depending on Erica’s outfit, it would sometimes take the couple over ten minutes of struggling to get her done up properly, a tribulation that would often leave the both of them spent and exhausted, Erica usually more so.

For what it was worth, Darryl didn’t mind helping his wife dress and undress on a daily basis at all. On the contrary, he liked to treat is as a sensual experience, especially when it came to the undressing later in the evening… that morning in their bedroom located on the first floor, for example, he had kissed each diamond-shaped bulge of fat that peeked through the gaps in her blouse, working his way down her prolific paunch until he was on his knees, repeatedly smooching the most prominent fat bulges, the ones nearest the crest of her belly hang where her middle bulged out the farthest, held aloft slightly and kept from sagging too far down by the tightness of Erica’s outfit. This was intentional on Erica’s part. Wearing the right kind of restrictive clothing to work prevented her from jiggling too much around the office while still keeping her well-kept and professional. Erica had always been a bit of a neat-freak. She was a big eater, sure, but not a messy one, and while one of her co-workers might have often found her snacking on the job, they would never once find her with a single crumb, smear or sauce stain from a prior repast marring her impeccably pressed and puckered outfits.

When Erica had finally stopped sucking in and released her tummy, letting it extend to its full volume with a loud sigh of relief, the pockets of exposed belly fat had only grown wider as her belly stretched billowed out to take up even more room that her blouse simply didn’t have.

Current Erica sighed, resting one hand on the top of her prize-winning belly while she poked and prodded the protruding puff with her free hand. There was nothing she could do about it now. The problem with restrictive clothing, Erica had had to repeatedly learn, was that, after a few too many pancakes, it started to become too restrictive. Erica had noshed her way through a very, very large breakfast twenty minutes earlier, as she did almost every morning, and as she reached for another handful of cookies, the buttons on her blouse were practically begging her to stop shoveling more and more starch and carbohydrates into her greedy maw. They were strained enough against the massive girl’s big belly when she was doing her best to suck it in; holding Erica’s belly in when she was relaxed and letting it surge forward was a task of an entirely harder level of difficulty. So, by that measure, holding Erica’s tummy in when she was full and bloated… Erica’s blouse had reached its absolute limit, and surely anyone as savvy and self-conscious about professionalism as she would have surely gone with a different option, today of all days especially. But Erica didn’t really have a choice. This was officially the biggest blouse that she had, and the only one that still “fit” her. She had been so busy preparing her big presentation over the past ten or so months that she hadn’t taken the time to get anything tailored, and Erica was a fast grower. Not only was the blouse crafted to be extra-soft and stretchy, she had remembered the damned thing being loose when she had first had it tailored, for God’s sake! At the very least, it had completely covered her, unlike now. Now, in fact, it was so skintight and stressed around the buttons Erica feared that her belly might burst forth at any moment, sending pearl sequins flying every which way like tiny, polished slingshot pellets. She did NOT need another repeat of that wardrobe malfunction at work. The last and only time it had happened, she had waddled out of the office as fast as she could, red-faced and bare-bellied, calling out sick for the afternoon and doing her best to avoid the stares of her colleagues.

Of course, her coworkers rarely paid attention to such things anymore. Erica may have been jaw-droopingly obese, but she was also almost as smart as she was fat and had proven her prowess and acumen in everything from statistics to stocks; she was an invaluable member of her work’s team and, once people learned to get used to her appearance, they saw her as just another one of the team, an ambitious shark out for blood in the turbulent sea of tariffs and tax havens who was out for hers, and hers alone. The fact that this particular shark took an extra hour every day for her lunch break and had needed to requisition for reinforced seating in her office and all of the conference rooms was just another manifestation of the voracity that she so readily applied to her work regimen as well as her dietary one.

‘Maybe one day they’ll do a Lifetime original movie on me,’ she would muse to herself, patting the top of her mighty belly as she daydreamed. ‘The Eight Hundred Pound Actuary’.

But a current-situation Erica was in no mood to joke about her weight, her usual reluctant nonchalance about her size discarded as she fretted over the Herculean task that her slow husband had unwittingly left her with. She was going to have to do something that she hadn’t done in years, something she wasn’t sure she could still do even if she wanted to. She was going to have to take the stairs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.