swahilimonkfish

TURKISH DELIGHT
by
Swordfish
 
BBW, weight gain.  A bookish male forms an unlikely friendship with a Turkish girl who works at the local fruit and veg store. Their relationship friendship blossoms; but so does her waistline... 
   
When I moved into my London flat in the area five years ago, the nearest place to get fresh fruit and veg – although fresh in this case isn’t quite the word - was a dingy little store several streets away that specialised in selling items that looked as if they had fallen off the back of a lorry or were scrounged from supermarket dustbins. Bruised carrots. Yellowing lettuces. Oranges about to turn into penicillin. The English couple that ran it didn’t inspire confidence either, being about as dishevelled as their stock. I can’t remember what the store’s official name was; I just thought of it as ‘The Place of Last Resort’.  
After about a year of trying to avoid their services, I was encouraged to find the premises one day under new management. It was now run by a Turkish guy, and he seemed to know what he was doing, actually getting vegetables and fruit that people might want to eat. Week after week, the stock of items seemed to grow larger, fresher, and better. The new owner worked really hard turning the place around, and it obviously paid off financially. When the premises next door became vacant, he rented that space as well, using it as his store room for what had become quite an exotic and imaginative array of food suitable for all kinds of cuisines. As the business grew, so did his number of employees, all of them Turkish, all male, bantering with each other in the usual masculine way. Eventually a young female Turkish face joined them at the till, to be replaced after a while by another one, then another one. None of them stayed very long. I figured that it couldn’t have been very easy working there, outnumbered by Turkish men busily behaving like, well, men.
With the store’s regular supplies of potatoes of all shapes, interesting lettuce, and curious objects like passion fruit, I quickly became a regular customer. Around two years ago, I found another reason to frequent the place. She was the latest female employee, Turkish of course, significantly prettier than her predecessors, medium height, dark hair dangling down either side of a friendly face, further blessed with a pleasant smile, a cute freckle just under her right eye, and a delicate, melodious voice that immediately charmed me, even though the words I heard, at least at first, barely stretched beyond “Hi”, “Cash or card?” and “Would you like a receipt?”. I admired her general physique as well, which was fairly trim, though she had slighter bigger breasts than the rest of her might lead you to expect, and a very modest curve on her tummy, rather like one of those sweet little air pillows sometimes used in packaging to fill out a box.
I thought of both features as engaging quirks that gave her an extra twist of femininity, interestingly emphasised one day when I caught her stretching her torso in a big yawn ­­– a movement that pushed both breasts and air pillow further out. For some reason, I found myself thinking it was a strange prefiguring of how she might look if she ever grew heavier. 
Each time I did my little food shop I hoped she would be on duty. Like me at the second-hand bookshop I worked at, she was employed in shifts. I tried to remember which days she was there, mornings, afternoons, early evenings. Sunday was generally reliable, also mid-week afternoons. With no particular goal in mind, other than being pleasant, I gradually began to engage her in light conversation. Awful weather isn’t it? Have a good night. See you again!  Over the weeks, a light customer flow permitting, the exchanges slowly grew longer. She seemed to enjoy talking to me, even if it was often about fruit or veg. I got into the habit of deliberately picking out some exotic item, something I didn’t know how to cook, just to have a conversation point and to enjoy the warmth of her voice and smile. 
“You are adventurous, aren’t you?” she’d remark, pricing up some furry ball of fruit that looked just like that alien species in the creaky old original TV “Star Trek”. Tribbles, they were called. I was going to eat tribbles. Then, on my next visit, she’d ask me what I thought of them - the tribbles, kiwanos, or jujubes, or whatever they were. 
In time I felt confident enough to tell her my name - it was Michael, nothing fancy – hoping that would be the gateway to me learning hers. She wasn’t offering it at first, so I asked a bit nervously, “And yours?” She grinned and said, “It’s on your receipt!”
I peered at the little strip of paper she’d just given me, full of details I’d never absorbed. “What? Where?”
“Where it says ‘Operator’.”  
“Filiz? Filiz? That’s your name? It’s lovely!” 
Her grin broadened. “It means blossom, to flower, to sprout.”
 “You mean you’re named after a vegetable?”
She tinkled with laughter, sweet as the sound of silver bells. “No, silly, to sprout, to blossom.” She waved her hands in the air, as if describing petals opening, or anyway something growing. Looking back on it, this was the magic moment when I felt we’d finally made some personal connection, something deeper than routine chatter between customer and employee.
But having achieved that, what next? I could hardly hold up other customers for half an hour talking about how I disliked iceberg lettuce. Any advanced contact with the bewitching Filiz would have to be outside her work hours. A few weeks later I plucked up enough courage to suggest we could have a coffee or something at the end of one of her shifts. “Sure,” she said, almost without blinking, “that would be nice.”
Would it? I began to wonder. It would be nice, certainly, if we discovered we had things, experiences, feelings in common beyond fruit and veg. After all, I knew nothing about her, nothing substantial anyway, beyond what I saw with my eyes. What if there were awkward silences, when we’d exhausted our repertoire of chat? What if she’d, say, never opened a book in her life, and spent all her spare time gaming or painting her nails in funny colours? How could we get on then? 
 I finally decided that this was a risk I’d have to take. And I guess she did too. At the appointed time, she met me outside the store, by the crates of citrus fruit and  larger vegetables usually displayed to lure passers-by. She wore a puffer jacket, suitable for autumn, which gave her a slightly chunky look, and a cute little hat. I suggested a place up the road, which looked good for the usual drinks and snacks. That was run by Turks as well, she told me. And once settled in at our table, to my great pleasure we were off and away, each telling the other our backgrounds, hers obviously more exotic than mine. She’d come to the UK when she was three, she said, when her parents had emigrated, following the path of other relatives, living and working with them too, before they branched out with a little foodstore of their own. Finally getting fed up with British weather, and finding the foodstore hard, they eventually moved back to Istanbul about five years ago. 
All this was certainly interesting, though as we drank our Turkish coffee and consumed one of those sweet Turkish pastries, of which she seemed rather fond, I was secretly more curious about what her living situation was, whether she had a boyfriend, or girlfriend for that matter. She lived with an older sister, she told me. She also revealed she was 23. I said I was somewhat older, but not enough to be frightening. She didn’t seem to mind. The whole experience, I thought, was successful enough for me to suggest at the end that we met up again “sometime”. “Let’s do that,” she said, the freckle under her right eye moving a little as she smiled. She really was lovely.
When we met for our next coffee a couple of weeks later, she greeted me with a modest kiss, something I hadn’t so far dared to attempt. Much of the talk in these early meetings seemed to be about Turkish cuisine - she was proud of her Turkish heritage - and our abilities, or lack of them, in cooking.  I’d tell her about some disaster I’d recently had, like absent-mindedly heating up a saucepan without putting any water or vegetables inside. Or I went back to the memory of some student flatshare when I accidentally prepared a depressing meal where everything on the plate was more or less white: the potatoes, the piece of fish, even the plate. She had her own tales of burnt saucepans, of dropping fancy desserts onto the floor. We found we shared another interest: watching the Swedish detective dramas, “Scandi noirs”, they called them, currently being shown on TV. One way and other, there was plenty to talk about.
 
 
 

Looking back on these early days, what surprises me more than ever is the speed at which things then developed, and indeed the fact that they developed at all. Amiable chit-chat and fond feelings are one thing, but we were still two people with different lives, me a rather lonely bachelor more familiar with books than with negotiating human relationships, she much more of a girl about town, unbookish though certainly intelligent, with a family background way outside my experience. Yet even within these few coffee meetings we’d somehow generated enough momentum to propel us towards what you might call friendship-plus. 
The first phase of the acceleration featured evenings in Turkish restaurants, soon curtailed on the grounds of economy - neither of us earned very much - but very enjoyable while they lasted, certainly on the food front. After I expressed surprised that menus in Turkish restaurants never seemed to have dishes featuring turkey (I was only joking), Filiz guided me through the different ways of cooking lamb, aubergine, rice, lentils, tomatoes, onions, garlic: the ingredients and tastes went on and on. Then there were the ancillaries: the mezes, or hors d’oeuvres, beforehand, fresh bread and olives during, and sweets afterwards, like Filiz’s beloved baklava, and everything washed down with a bottle of Turkish wine. Cooking in our own flats was nowhere near as lavish or authentic, but I bought a Turkish recipe book and did what I could to duplicate some of what we had in restaurants. My prize creation, assuming I had enough time and patience, was what Filiz called ‘Moussaka à la Mickey’ - she liked to call me Mickey - though it generated rather more food than it was probably wise to consume in one go.
It was after a month or so of these dining encounters that I realised that Filiz had started to gain some weight: real weight, this time, and not because of a puffer jacket or the effect of a big yawn. It wasn’t surprising, I suppose, considering the calories flying around when we were together, though I didn’t seem so affected. I spotted the change first in her face, which was looking a bit fuller, with rounder cheeks, emphasised whenever she smiled. Sometimes there was even, if she lowered a head, the faintest suggestion of a double chin, soon gone once the head was raised: hardly a crime, I know, and quite common, but still, this was something new. The clinching evidence, though, came one night when we sat after our meal watching the first episode of a new “Scandi noir” about a Swedish detective with problems, called Gudrun, who seemed to spend most of her time not solving crimes but being analysed by her psychiatrist in a gloomy apartment with particularly low lighting. 
Half way through I turned to her on my sofa and asked her if she understood what was going on. “Absolutely not,” she replied, almost with enthusiasm. That’s one thing I liked about Filiz: she was truthful.
“Well, that makes two of us, then!” We both laughed, and then as my eyes began pivoting back towards the screen I suddenly noticed the newly increased curve of her belly, looming out of a familiar pair of blue jeans, often worn when she was at work, but now looking a really tight fit. She’d definitely put on some pounds.  
I didn’t make any comment about the matter, and the evening went on its usual way, climaxing in a friendly hug about 11 o’clock and a promise to see each other soon. Putting my arms around her, moving towards our parting kiss, I felt her breasts and tummy pressing against me as never before. Descending the stairs, she turned to give me a last farewell smile, and a last flash of those fuller cheeks.
The discovery that Filiz was gaining some weight left me with mixed emotions, some of which I didn’t understand. Since I’d always considered her a paragon of beauty, part of me felt that I should be upset that her body’s outlines were beginning to change and, officially speaking, not for the better. But another part of me - the bigger part - found the slight physical change fascinating. Now that I spotted her larger belly, I kept looking out for it, hoping the clothes she wore would give it prominence, feeling disappointed if they didn’t. I took equal pleasure in her very small and fugitive double chin, here one second, gone the next. An ornithologist might feel the same way about a rare bird visiting a garden: something deliciously novel, worth attention and respect. 
Over the next few weeks, aside from pleasuring in her fuller form, I began to notice something else new about her: a habit of fiddling with what she was wearing, flexing the top of her jeans, say, or pulling at the bottom of her blouse, as if making sure that everything still fitted. And one time, after a meal, she gave her new tummy a quick pat. Was this a sign that she was getting used to being a little bit bigger, or a sign that she wasn’t? I was unsure. I hoped she wasn’t embarrassed or distressed by her extra pounds: it hurt me that she might feel guilt or pain simply by doing something so ordinary and something she clearly enjoyed: eating food. Besides, I could see nothing but extra beauty, not less, in her gently growing curves.
Three weeks later, the next stage of the journey arrived. It was a Wednesday night, and I’d been invited over to Filiz’s flat for the usual dinner, plus another TV episode of the Swedish thriller, “Night Shifts”, of which we were fading fans. Rasheda, her sister, was away for a few days, and Filiz was obviously making more of an effort than usual to entertain her guest. She’d made a moussaka of her own, far tastier than mine. She’d also slipped out of her work clothes and put on a becoming black dress, a tight clinger that made the most of her new curves. She looked particularly delightful, I thought, and a much bigger attraction than Gudrun’s latest adventures.  Difficult enough to follow in episode one, the narrative was now getting more complicated than ever, chiefly because the detective’s twin sister had turned up and we couldn’t work out why. Filiz’s theory, not unreasonable, was that the twin sister would prove to be the murderer in the crime that Gudrun was trying to solve. My theory was that she was just a red herring, but Filiz said she couldn’t be red as everyone in the series always looked grey, at least in the murky photography. I smiled, looked at Filiz again, dressed in black, and placed an appreciative hand on her right thigh. 
We struggled through the rest of the episode, finished off the bottle of wine, and then it was time for me to go. But then she said with a seductive, beckoning kind of look, “Why not stay over, if you want to?” 
“You mean - ?“
“I mean.”
Of course I said yes. Within ten minutes, we were in her bedroom, me cautiously loosening my clothes - it had been such an age since I’d been in this situation - while she wriggled free of the black dress, followed by her private niceties, leaving her at the end naked and unadorned, perched on the edge of the bed. 
“I’m not at my best right now,” she said sorrowfully, following my gaze, “I’ve been putting on weight”. Below her breasts, such lovely round breasts, sat her original little air pillow of fat, but now grown wider and deeper, stretched out in a roll across her midriff, resting on the top of her thighs. “It’s all your fault, too,” she went on, pinching the roll between two fingers. “You’re making me eat too much!”  
At the same time I noticed the love handles filling out each hip and the soft look of her upper arms. All in all, Filiz without her clothes was a little fleshier than I had imagined. Maybe she always had been.
“But you look gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous!” I cried.
She gave me a wry look. “Try saying that in a lie detector test.”
I told her that wouldn’t be a problem. “I’d pass with flying colours. And so would you, flying colours.” 
She let loose her warmest grin. Sorrow had passed. “Stop talking,” she said, “and come to bed.” 

At first we lay side by side, gazing into each others’ eyes. Needing to warm us up and get acquainted with her body at close quarters, I started gently massaging her breasts. She told me to take off my wristwatch. “Sorry about that,” I murmured, before returning to the nipples, fingering them oh so lightly, then following a downward path over her tummy, feeling the layer of fat quickly thicken as the belly button approached before starting to taper down towards the delicate forested area where her tummy and legs met. She obligingly moved her legs apart, raised them, and I sank into place on top, comfortable in the cushion of her curves. 
What followed probably doesn’t need description, though even in the heat of it I was struck by the sheer intensity of the groans, pantings and cries that we produced. It took me back to a time at university when my room was next to a couple who seemed to burn up the sheets every evening, and always at a decibel level that I’d never ever managed myself, either then or since. Until now. It was a wonderful night, and I didn’t need Filiz’s grin to tell me she felt the same. 
Waiting for sleep to overcome me, I worked out that all my previous bed partners – I could count them on the fingers of one hand - had been rather lanky beanpoles, with not much padding on the bones. Filiz’s soft coating of flesh was something else. I suddenly realised how dense I’d been, blind to something so obvious. I’d previously thought it was just the novelty of Filiz gaining that so attracted me. It was more than that. There was serious sexual stimulation involved. I felt I’d uncovered a secret equation: that extra pounds on Filiz’s body equalled extra sensuality and better sex. No wonder I had started to find pleasure simply in watching Filiz eat, absorbing the calories that might well end up pushing out her tummy a little more, filling some hollow, or thickening her thighs. As a discovery, my equation might not have been up there with Einstein’s theory of relativity, but it was very significant for me.
Waking up together in bed was wonderful. I cupped her in my arms, gazed at her sweet, slightly fattened face, kissed her forehead, cheeks and lips, and repeatedly stroked her right shoulder. I so wanted to cherish and take care of her. “I have to get up,” she eventually said, her melodious voice heavy with regret. Her sister was returning today, she told me. We both agreed it was a pity, though she said Rasheda wouldn’t have any objections to anyone sleeping over. It was obvious to both of us that we would be doing this again, either at her flat or mine.  
She took a quick shower and washed her hair; my own shower was much quicker, enough to be able to catch her putting on her clothes, buttoning and zipping herself up for the outside world. Armed with my secret equation, I found this both teasing and thrilling. On went the panties and the camisole top, clearly outlining the growing tummy and the perky round breasts. On went an off-white blouse, obviously getting to be a bit of a squeeze, with extra care needed to fix the small buttons around the breasts. Then it was time for the jeans, the famous blue jeans, now requiring an extra yank to pull them over her belly and hips. There was no need for a belt, I spotted, to tighten the jeans and keep them hoisted; her midriff flesh now did that for her. With clothes in place, holding back that softened body, I found every simple move she made exquisitely provocative as she darted about the kitchen, preparing a simple breakfast of coffee, eggs, and Turkish bread. 
We quickly arranged a return visit to my own flat, the first of many overnight stays. I began to realise that, yes, it was true: against the odds I was actually in a relationship with Filiz! She stayed over at least once a week, often twice, happy to linger over the coffee, the wine, and a dinner where I’d watch her forking her way through portions that I tried to ensure were quietly larger than my own.  This was a golden time for me; for her too, I felt, as we grew together in love and intimacy. Despite occasional comments like “I shouldn’t be eating this” or some more cautious fingering of her belly, Filiz continued to enjoy eating whatever came her way, with the expected results: more fat on her belly, bigger love handles, a fuller face. With things going so well, on every front, I began to think about the possible next step in our relationship: actually moving in together. Being a proper couple. Admitterdly, the four flights of stairs up to my flat, in a typical London terrace of big Victorian houses, weren’t ideal; but at least there was room for two when you got there. 
Bed sessions continued to be luxurious, though as warmer weather came with the spring I began to notice that perhaps my foreplay stroking her body wasn’t arousing her as much as before. Her appetite also seemed to have shrunk a little. Watching her set off for work, belly sometimes poking out of last summer’s tops, really too small now for the job, I thought she might be reining herself in a bit because she felt self-conscious. It wouldn’t be surprising: even I was occasionally taken by surprise by the changes that had taken place, changes that were beginning to make her just as chunky as she previously looked when puffed up in that quilted jacket. 
 

The first rumblings of a thundercloud came when I was invited over for a dinner with her sister, whom I’d usually seen in their flat only in passing. A secretary for an estate agent, she was opinionated, a bit sharp-tongued, but pleasant enough, and as slim as Filiz used to be. While Filiz was busy in the kitchen, Rasheda sang my praises, saying that all her sister’s previous boyfriends had been worthless clowns and quickly dumped, but I had a bit of class. Educated, too. “Well, up to a point,” I said. She then went on to tell me that I was making Filiz very happy, but also chubbier. I felt myself blushing crimson, though she explained that she didn’t mean that I was doing it in purpose. It was just a case of relationship pounds. I admitted that she was putting on weight, while adding that I thought it suited her. 
“You wouldn’t say that,” Rasheda replied, “if you caught her swearing in the morning when she realises she can’t fit into another pair of jeans. Before long I bet you’ll be hearing the D word.” 
The D-word? I couldn’t think of any strong swear word beginning with D. Damn? Damnation? Then Rasheda, wearing a “men are so stupid” expression, told me the D word was diet. My face fell, and only partly because I’d been barking up the wrong tree. 
Rasheda continued, whispering now: “Then there’s the bra problem.”  
“What about them?”   
“They don’t fit her any more. She’s spilling out of them or doesn’t wear them at all. Her breasts really need a controlling hand.” 
“Yes, mine,” I thought, behind closed lips.
Rasheda pressed on with her whispering: “Gaining weight for a woman, Mickey, is never easy.” 
“Obviously not,” I said. 
The next sound we heard, from the kitchen, was “Dinner’s ready!” Filiz then swept through the door, beautiful breasts bouncing, rounder face glowing, bearing a baking tray of her best moussaka. 
“What have you been talking about?” she said gaily. 
I tried to sound breezy. “Oh, nothing much.” 
Rasheda then chipped in. “Greyhound racing.” 
Looking only faintly perplexed, Filiz moved onto spooning portions onto our plates, and the evening went on its merry way. But it did leave me somewhat disturbed about some of my behaviour. By surreptitiously plying Filiz with extra calories, hadn’t I been thinking of my own pleasure than her own? Shouldn’t I have paid her proper respect by seriously considering her own feelings, and not just lazily assuming that she was more or less happy enough to go along for the ride?  It worried me.
The lightning I expected to strike struck several days later when she’d agreed to come by for lunch: not something we usually did, but it just fitted in with our schedules. I was eager to tell her about my visit the day before to an eccentric book collector who only collected books that were six inches high – Filiz enjoyed lunacies like that. But all that was knocked out of my head when she immediately announced, with apologies, that she actually didn’t want lunch after all. The D word had arrived. 
“Ever since we’ve been seeing each other I’ve been gaining weight. I know you kind of like it, but it’s getting to be too much for me. I’ve got to cut back. One of the guys at work yesterday poked me right in the middle and called me a crumpet.”
Crumpet? I didn’t like the sound of that.
“He’d just bought some crumpets at the supermarket and he said their description on the packet sounded just like me. ‘Scrumptiously soft and fluffy’ ”.
It was indeed an accurate description, and I’m sure had been put on the packet as something positive, but I still didn’t appreciate him saying it, especially as he was clearly making fun of her. “I’ll go and beat him up!” I said, coming over all Sir Galahad.
She managed a slight smile. “Oh, Mickey, don’t be silly. He works out, he’s bad-tempered, and got lots of tattoos. You wouldn’t come out of it very well.”
“Well...” - I searched around for a softer alternative - “I’ll write a note to his mother.”
“Mickey,” she said, laughing in spite of herself, “this is serious!”
Oh, I knew it was serious, and that she was serious, and I also knew that I’d give her my full support her whatever she did. I’d fallen for her when she was thinner, and I felt our connection, that inner fire, wouldn’t go away if things changed. Her chubbing up had just been the icing on the cake. And when all was said and done it was the cake I loved the most. Sitting round the kitchen table, I told her that whatever she needed to do, I would be with her, though I argued that as she’d be standing at her till all afternoon she should still eat a little something. She suggested a little salad and a piece of fruit.  “No dessert,” she added, “nothing sweet.” No icing, then. It was OK. 
I swung toward the kitchen, hoping to find enough cucumber, tomatoes, and a lettuce with a bit of a bounce, and asked if she had a diet goal. She pointed to her tummy. “This,” she said, ”I want to lose this”, though she added that she might keep just a bit of it to please me if I was good.  I wasn’t sure exactly how she’d defined “good”, but I told her I’d be on my very best behaviour.
Once I’d rustled something up, it was odd to see her facing such a meagre meal, though I knew I would have to get used to it. Trying to keep the mood light, for my own sake as much as hers, I dipped into my memory bank and told her that I’d once joked with my bookshop colleagues that I was thinking of having a tattoo myself, on the calf of my left leg. 
“A tattoo of what, for God’s sake?” Filiz said, looking incredulous, tomato poised on the end of her fork. I said I’d suggested a tattoo of T. S. Eliot, but emphasised that it was all a joke. I hadn’t been remotely serious.
She looked more incredulous than ever. “T. S. who?”  I helped her out: a big American-British poet, 20th century, worked in a bank, then in publishing. Wrote a famous poem called “The Waste Land”.
“The waist land,” she mused in her melodious voice, rubbing a hand over the looming bulge at the top of her jeans, “that’s just what I want to lose!” 
I felt so fondly towards her at that second that I immediately leant over and kissed her. It wasn’t just what she said, it was how she said it: the voice so light, so expressive and animated, so innocent, running over the words with the sparkle of a clear mountain stream.  How could I not adore her? I would never think of “The Waste Land” in the same way again.
Under the new dispensation our intertwined lives carried on, though I felt with a little less enjoyment of life from both sides. Constantly watching your food intake, counting calories, saying no when deep down you meant yes: all that has to cut into a relationship’s rhythm and flow, especially when only one of the pair is dieting. I didn’t know what bathroom scales would have revealed - neither of us had any - but I certainly grew aware that her tummy was getting less prominent and her face a little tauter. The bed experience wasn’t ruined, though I couldn’t deny that I missed the luxury of the cushion of softness that had built up over her body during the winter months. In time she had lost enough pounds to be able to reclaim at least some of the clothes she’d had to put on one side, though I thought with some of her t-shirts she was rather jumping the gun.
Filiz’s enjoyment of life took another and much more serious dip when worrying news arrived from Turkey: her mother wasn’t at all well, and was due for tests. Their mother, I know, was a powerful force in their family, really its heartbeat, the one that still kept it a family even when some of its members were geographically separated. Both sisters became anxious, wondering what the tests might show. Filiz’s appetite even for salads started to dwindle under the strain. Once news of the tests came through, the black cloud they were living under only grew blacker still. A galloping bone cancer had been diagnosed. She hadn’t long to live.
Both of them knew that they had to go back to Istanbul and await whatever happened. Filiz didn’t know how long she could stay away from work, though her boss was understanding. Shifts could be juggled; a fill-in could be found. Rasheda, with a classier job and unused holiday days stacked up, had more elbow room. But however it was arranged, both of them knew they couldn’t delay. A couple of days later, I mournfully stroked Filiz’s sad face, kissed her goodbye and held her in a hug that I wished could last forever. I can’t remember what consoling or encouraging words I found to say, but I’m sure they were very inadequate. 

I found the separation hard to bear. Part of the trouble was the uncertainty of knowing when we could talk. I suspected she’d have little time to herself in Istanbul, quite apart from any technical glitches with computers, phones, all the rest of it. Apart from an email via her father’s computer saying they had safely arrived, I was left in the dark for most of a week with no other company for conversation except my bookshop colleagues, the occasional customer, and the man who collected books six inches high, who kept on calling me at work. I really didn’t want to know about the 1853 Persian, Arabic and English dictionary he’d found. I wanted to know about Filiz.
Then she phoned one evening. She said things were awful. Her mother looked terrible, so sick, so thin. It was only a matter of time. I asked if she’d been able to talk to her. Yes, she said, on and off, but increasingly off. Everyone was glad she and Rasheda had come; and there were uncles and aunts and cousins visiting too. She was sorry she hadn’t been able to phone before. She missed me. She’d phone again, but didn’t know when. She had to go now. Kiss kiss. Goodnight. And that, for the moment, was it. 
It was only two days later when she phoned again. I could tell immediately by the tone of her voice what had happened. Before she had sounded under pressure, agitated, the words emerging faster than usual, the melodious rise and fall flattened. Now she seemed calmer in a way, but much, much sadder, speaking almost in a monotone. “She’s dead, Mickey, she died this morning.”
I offered what comfort I could, saying at least her mother’s suffering was over. She’d had a good life, she was loved and would still be loved. “Yes, yes,” Filiz said, seeming on the verge of tears. I told her it was OK to cry. “I’m too tired to cry at the moment,” she said, though from her sniffs I could tell her eyes were moistening. I asked if she’d stay for the funeral. “If I can. I’ll let you know. But it’s late here, I’d better go...” I had never heard her sound so exhausted, so forlorn. And not to be able to cradle and hug her with my love: it was heartbreaking. I didn’t get much sleep that night.
My little daily round continued, but it seemed so drab without Filiz. I kept on worrying about her, hoping for news that the funeral had been set, that it had happened, and that she was coming back. Five more days, and she phoned again: if all went to plan, she’d be back next Thursday. Thursdays, for some reason, had always been my least favourite day of the week. Not any more. Following instructions, I passed on the news to her boss at the fruit and veg store - equally drab without her. While there, I noticed the tattooed giant who had compared her to a crumpet shifting a crate of potatoes. I gave him a glare and a wide berth. You don’t make fun of my precious Filiz, I thought.  You treat her with love and respect. That’s what I was going to do, I promised myself, more than ever before. 
After the funeral she phoned me briefly, very emotional, but collected enough to give me details of the flight and its arrival time at the aiport. Rasheda, she said, would be staying on a little longer. I’d be there, I said, and so I was, waiting along with other hopefuls as passengers of all colours and shapes and sizes, pulling luggage, emerged through the swing doors.  It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as such a strange and miraculous procession: these hundreds and hundreds of anonymous bodies passing by, people who meant nothing to me, and among them, somewhere, I hoped sometime soon, the one special person in all the world who lit up my life. I just had to wait, and she would emerge. 
And there she suddenly was, in the distance, wheeling her suitcase, starting to scan the horizon looking for what I hoped was her special person too. I waved. She waved, came closer and closer, until we were in each others’ arms in a vigorous hug. Though I felt her breasts pressing upon me, the remains of her tummy too, I thrust them to the back of her mind: what mattered now was the whole Filiz, inside and out, back from an emotional ordeal. 
She looked a bit paler than usual and tired around the eyes, understandable considering what she’d been through. I was expecting to find her a bit thinner, but in that department she looked much the same, maybe even a tiny fraction bigger. Numerous family meals, perhaps. But I didn’t want to enquire. Not the time. Not the place. 

We had a long train journey into the centre of London. At first she deflected conversation away from herself, wanting to know how I was, what had been happening. I didn’t have much to tell her. The usual activities at the bookshop: i.e., nothing. A new series of “Night Shifts” had begun on TV, with Gudrun under more psychological pressure than usual, this time trying to solve a particularly grisly murder while also undergoing gender transfer treatment. I could tell, however, that Filiz wasn’t really following what I was saying.  
“Come on,” I encouraged her, ”tell me how things went. How they really went.” She managed to tell me external details of the funeral, who was there, what was said, but was distracted by other passengers coming and going, and the general lack of privacy. Partly for that reason, once we’d left the train I decided to damn the expense and get a taxi to go the remaining few miles.  
“Now for home,” she said, sinking back happily into the taxi’s back seat. Without thinking, I started to give the taxi driver Filiz’s address, when she quickly jumped in and gave him mine. 
“Our flat now,” she half-whispered to me, “I’m moving in. If you don’t mind?” I could see the taxi driver grinning. I was grinning too, from ear to ear. 
“Of course I don’t mind,” I said, after giving her the biggest kiss. Why, oh why, had living together taken us so long?
Once in the flat, she flopped exhausted onto the sofa. I got her some tea, all the while sizing up in my head the available space for couple living, a new adventure for me. I asked her delicately how much stuff she’d have to bring from Rasheda’s flat, and if she’d discussed the move with her. The short answers were “Not much” and “Yes”, which were pretty much the long answers too. She really did look tired. 
Now the real story of her trip emerged, of how terrible it was seeing her mother so sick and wasted. “I can’t get that out of my mind,” she kept saying. By now her head was on my shoulders, crying, and I was cradling her in my arms, loosening my tender hold only to track down a tissue, a clean handkerchief, or something so she could wipe away her tears. But then, the crying only redoubled as she remembered her last visit to the hospital, and the last words her mother said to her. Filiz kept breaking up as she repeated them, and I didn’t properly grasp them at first. Then I did. “Don’t worry, eat well’: those were the words. Don’t worry, eat well.  
I didn’t say anything for a moment, anything substantial anyway. I felt there were more emotions and memories,due to come out, but I didn’t want to force them. She quietened down a little. Even with her hair dishevelled and reddened eyes, Filiz still looked spectacularly beautiful. She gazed up at me as if desperate for understanding. “I felt so awful, I just felt I’d let her down. Do you know what I mean?”
I thought I could make a reasonable guess. She’d gone to Turkey on a diet, concerned about the way she’d filled out, only to find her worries knocked into triviality by seeing her mother practically wasting away.  
“And my cousin,” she went on, “she didn’t help. There I was complaining about getting a bit chubby and she turned up, big as a balloon after a couple of years of marriage, telling me how happy she was and that it was just in the genes. Telling me really that I was being a fool. And when I looked at my mother, of course I was.”
“But you did eat?” I asked quietly. “Properly? I mean, no diet things?”
She narrowed her eyes, as if conjuring up in her mind’s eye the anxious meals  fitted in between hospital visits. “I tried to. But I didn’t have much appetite.”
“And now, right now?  What about some lunch?” It was early in the afternoon. She couldn’t have had much for breakfast, I imagined, and air travel was always draining. 
She paused a little, sighed, composed herself, and let loose a little smile. ‘I’m ravenous.”
To mark the occasion we went to the Turkish place where we’d had our very first meal together all those months before. I worried at first that she might not be up for London Turkish fare after her family’s home cooking, but she raised no objection, and spent so much time surveying the menu that it seemed like she was tasting each item in her mind.  Given what she had gone through, I tried to keep the conversation away from delicate matters, so much so that I can’t now remember what we talked about. I can’t even recall what we ate, though I remember Filiz enjoying her bread. 
And I certainly remember the moment, the telling moment, when she said she wanted to eat two desserts. “One for me,” she said, “and one for my mother”. It was a way, she told me, of paying her respects.  I looked at her with her tired beauty, slightly rounder cheeks, and sweet little tummy under her breasts, and thought to myself that it if she kept paying her respects like that Filiz was going to be gaining back all the weight she’d lost. I probably said something in reply like “That’s such a nice thought”. Which it was.

Over the next few weeks, both of us luxuriated in the simple joy of sharing our lives and our bed, waiting for each other to come home from work, doing all the simple partner things that I’d previously done on my own: the supermarket shop, cleaning the flat, putting the rubbish out. One day Filiz even managed to make something special out of hearing the refuse collectors banging bins when they woke her up on a Tuesday morning, a sound she wasn’t used to.  
“What’s that?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. I told her it was the bin men.
“The bin men!” she cried with awe and delight, as if they were a newly discovered type of human or even intergalactic visitors. “The bin men!” she repeated, savouring each syllable. “Isn’t life wonderful?”
That really cheered me, coming after months of anxiety and family upset. And though I would never have characterised her before as someone living on her nerves, she definitely seemed to have become more relaxed about everything. She slipped back into work without fuss, uncomplaining about what some would have thought a mundane job with no promotion prospects, tricky male colleagues, and hours standing on her feet. She was definitely more relaxed about eating. Don’t worry, eat well. The two dessert stunt wasn’t repeated when we ate out at restaurants, though in other respects she welcomed every indulgence, little or large. If she made dinner at home, I’d always find her licking spoons or nibbling on bread by the stove, while the amount she cooked always allowed for second helpings, typically destined for her plate. And afterwards - indeed at any spare moment - there was almost always some baklava to enjoy, or that sugary confection, Turkish Delight. I quickly renamed it Filiz’s Delight, a phrase that gave her almost as much pleasure as contemplating as the bin men.  
Living now at close quarters – very close quarters – I had a ringside seat as her figure, as I expected, quickly started softening again, though for some reason the distribution of the extra pounds turned out a little different the second time around. Her midriff podge, which had never entirely disappeared, quickly deepened, just as before, but was now accompanied by a new and increasing curve on her lower belly, heavier arms too. Before long it became abundantly clear that Filiz was not just getting back the pounds she had lost; she was zooming ahead into new territory, breaking new ground. 
Bobbing around the flat fully dressed, she was starting to look pleasantly chunky, with the added pounds clearly outlined under her clothes. Undressed, of course, there was no end to the beauty parade of bulges and creases as she took her shower, towelled herself, sat on the bed (that heavenly place), or strapped into place one of the new bras she’d recently acquired - part of a regenerated wardrobe bought to keep pace with her growing body. Some mornings I would catch her struggling into her jeans for the day, watching her tummy fat tumble over her panties as she bent over, only to be squeezed into new configurations of softness as she started pulling the jeans up one raised leg, then the other. Further delights awaited as she straightened up, breathed in a little and buttoned up, leaving her tummy to be further squeezed, the whole performance ending with a roll of fat looming all day over the top of her jeans like the crest of an unstoppable wave.
By now we talked openly about her gaining weight and her extended appetite. She knew she was getting chubbier, she said, but she’d decided to let things ride for the moment. It was something she felt she needed to do. I knew it was all tied in with her mother and her family, but I also thought her mother’s death had kindled within her some primal need to re-connect with her heritage, to be more Turkish, to look more Turkish and less European, or at least less skinny European. Wasn’t Turkey one of the homes of the belly dance? And who could do the belly dance if they didn’t have a belly? 
By now I saw no harm in openly buying goodies for her, and sometimes popping one of those treats she loved into her waiting mouth: bad for her teeth, I realised, but so beneficial for her figure. At the same time, all the while I knew in my heart that if she did shrivel back to her former slim self I still would love and cherish her just as much. It was the inner person that truly mattered. Her open and friendly personality, her uncomplicated delight in everything in life, her warmth, her sense of fun: such things had a powerful beauty all their own.  
By the time autumn arrived she had become quite a plump little package, with notably thicker thighs, a pretty regular double chin, and a rounder ass on top of everything else – a useful asset that must have helped her body find a new equilibrium to balance all the extra pounds elsewhere. It was the kind of figure that traditionally used to bring appreciative wolf whistles from workers on building sites.  One time she set out for work looking particularly juicy, wearing jeans stretched to the limit and a shirt that kept riding up to reveal her midriff bulge, so naked and soft, overflowing her waistband. When she came back, I asked her how the day went. “It went fine,” she said, with an airy grin. “Three people told me I was getting fat. One of them was even a customer.” But it was obvious that she didn’t mind.
Before we knew it the anniversary of our first official social engagement was approaching - that exploratory coffee meeting after she’d finished work. It was a date I held in special esteem; luckily, she did too. We’d decided to go out for dinner on the day itself, but on the evening before I thought it would be fitting if we had Rasheda round for a meal, and a bit of a family reunion. I’d only seen her briefly and occasionally since she’d come back from Turkey. She arrived carrying a small bouquet of flowers: a surprising and pleasant gift from someone who in my experience at least hadn’t always showed a thoughtful disposition.  Perhaps the Turkey trip and the family sorrow had mellowed her a bit. One other difference, I quickly realised, was that she was gaining some weight herself, and now had a little tummy of her own, curving gently out of her dress. It wasn’t a development that excited me particularly, but I certainly categorised it as interesting.
Filiz had decided to skip Turkish cuisine for once and go for something simpler and Italian. Spaghetti!  As she prepared it, we sat around the kitchen table talking of this and that. Rasheda mentioned she’d watched some of that annoying Swedish detective series on the internet.  Filiz chipped in from near the stove. “We gave up on that, didn’t we? Couldn’t make head or tail of it.” 
“Yes, absolutely baffling,” I said, thinking all the while how heartening it was that she had said “we”. We were a “we”! A year on, and I was still amazed at what had happened, us getting together, building up a relationship, becoming a couple. It had seemed so unlikely, so improbable. But here was Filiz, bustling around in the kitchen, happily domestic, a beautiful, well-upholstered young woman. I felt so thankful for the Gods, the Fates, or whoever it was that sorted out peoples’ lives. 
While Filiz attended to being domestic, Rasheda for some reason decided to carry on our chat stretched out full-length on the sofa – rather a proprietorial gesture, I thought, as if she was planning on moving in and making our flat her home too. At least her horizontal position brought into focus the curve on her tummy, pressed tight against her dress.  Possibly an eight pound gain? Minor, anyway, compared to the amount her sister had put on. 
Putting the cutlery and other items in place, Filiz raised a mocking eyebrow at her sister. “Do get comfortable, won’t you? Shall I bring you a pillow and a blanket?”
“Tiring day at work,” she said, without sounding tired at all. 
“A-ha.”
Rasheda finally raised herself upright just as the food arrived, and the meal began as normal. Turkish wine was poured. We clinked glasses. “Enjoy!” Filiz said, before digging in with her usual enthusiasm. Rasheda, I noticed, showed some spirit too, licking her lips before the first bite, savouring the meat sauce, and showering complements on the chef. “This is delicious!” 
“I know it is,” she said with a mischievous grin, “but it might have been even better if you’d offered to sprinkle a herb or something, instead of lying flat out on the sofa like Miss Lazy. And then the food arrives as if by magic, all in one swell foop!”
Both of us looked bewildered. Then the penny dropped. She meant fell swoop. Filiz often mixed up her English idioms. “It’s fell swoop,” I said, starting to laugh, “not swell foop. What’s a foop?”
Filiz improvised as her grin broadened. “It’s a Turkish fruit. You wouldn’t know it.”
Rasheda then got in on the act. “But shouldn’t it be full sweep? What’s a fell swoop anyway?” 
I mulled the words over on my tongue: “Swoop, foop ...”
At this point Filiz really got the giggles, the serious giggles, with her fuller cheeks looking extra full as she gurgled with laughter in her bell-like tones.  I expected Rasheda to join in, but instead she looked at her sister carefully for a few seconds and then said, “You know, the more weight you put on, the more you look just like our mother!” 
Filiz’s giggling was stopped in its tracks. Her eyes quickly moistened. Out came sobs, uncontrollable sobs for what seemed a minute or two, building in strength as pure emotion took hold. In the heat of her tears, I initially thought that Rasheda’s remark was a criticism, and I shot her a dirty look. “No, no, Mickey,” she explained, ‘it’s a compliment, isn’t it Filiz?”
Inbetween sobs and a little eye wiping she managed the word “Yes”.  Sitting next to her at the table, I began stroking her nearest arm. ”It’s alright, let it out,” I said, gently, “feel whatever you feel”.  
Rasheda by now was emotional too, which made Filiz cry even more. I remember thinking again, almost with embarrassment, how delectable Filiz looked even in her agitated state. Such a sweet face. The major curve of her breasts, the heavy arms, the thick roll of fat circling below. Didn’t “Filiz” in Turkish mean something to do with sprouting, with blossoming? Well, Filiz had blossomed, finally blossomed. I had a strong urge to comfort her with big hugs, but I didn’t want to choke her and thought it best if she came out of her mood in her own time. Once the tears were clearly in retreat, I decided to lead her just a sidestep away from the topic, though it really wasn’t a sidestep at all. 
“We don’t want the spaghetti to go cold, do we?” I said, “Your mother wouldn’t want that.” 
Filiz immediately jumped in. “No, she wouldn’t,” she said, vaguely reaching for her fork, though she was not quite at the point when she could actually pick it up.  She looked directly at her sister. “Would she?”
“Definitely not,” Rasheda said, her own tears just about controlled. 
Within a few seconds, the meal was resumed, and I watched with quiet pleasure as the two sisters, one getting comfortably round, the other perhaps pointing that way, returned to their pasta – knowingly eating, I felt for sure, under their mother’s auspices, following the guidance from her sick bed. Don’t worry, eat well. 
After another hour, well topped up with coffee and Turkish Delight, Rasheda finally said her goodbyes, with kisses and hugs, and left us to ourselves. We sat on the sofa. Filiz looked exhausted, but contented too. She rubbed a hand over her full stomach. I told her she could always undo the top button of her jeans. 
She did so, a faint smile on her lips. “I’m getting so big! You sure you don’t mind? I was so slim before. Well, pretty slim.”
I told her I absolutely didn’t mind. 
“Sorry for the dramatics,” she went on, “it just suddenly hit me.” 
“No worries,” I said. “Your mother was someone pretty special, wasn’t she?” 
“I loved her warm hugs. It was so comforting. She felt so soft.”
“Now you can give soft hugs of your own. Are you happy being heavier?” It was a question, I realised, that didn’t really need asking, but I thought it might be therapeutic.
“Not at the start, though I tried to be. Partly to please you. But now, definitely, yes. I’m a real woman. I’m happy I’m fatter. And you too?” This, again, didn’t need to be asked.
I told her I loved her at all sizes, but yes, definitely.  Now it was my turn to tell her to stop talking. I began to undo the top buttons of her blouse, before moving on to tugging at her jeans, trying to pull them over those well-padded hips.
“You’ve got to really yank them,” she said, before I covered her mouth with one of my hands.
“No more words,” I whispered, “just action. Come on, my jubube.” I took her hand and started to lead her toward the bedroom.
“What’s a jujube?” she said, giggling. I told her it was a fruit-flavoured sweet; the Victorians used it as a coughdrop. “Living with you,” she went on in that awestruck tone I loved so much, “I learn something new every day.” 
She swiftly disrobed. Her naked body, lightly imprinted around the waist with the abrasions left by her tight clothes, had never looked so beautiful. By this time all words, silly or serious, had dropped away. But breathing grew louder. We were both on the bed, passion glowing, with me on top, she underneath, plump and welcoming. A radiant smile beamed out of her face, round as a full moon, soon to be flushed with exultation as I pushed inside this lovely body grown soft as a pillow and entered the warm flesh of my girl Filiz, my lovely jujube, the love of my life, the light of my life, my Turkish Delight, cake and icing beautifully rolled into one.
 
THE END
© Swordfish, 2021
 
 
 
 

Chapter 2
Natasha startled awake as her phone alarm blared through the darkness of the bedroom. She slapped her hand in the direction of the nightstand until she found the offending device and hurriedly silenced it.
With the screen dimmed to minimum, she peered at the time—5:45 am. “Dammit.”
Beside her, Laura snored on serenely. One flabby, naked thigh protruded from the blankets, pale skin seeming almost to glow in the phone’s otherworldly light.
Natasha gave Laura’s shoulder a nudge, “Time to wake up, honey.”
More snores.
This time, Natasha gave the other woman’s shoulder a firmer shake.
Still just more snores.
Natasha placed her hand on Laura’s belly—which was protruding skyward like some sort of nocturnal monument to grease, sugar and saturated fat—and shook the mound of adipose hard enough to make the bed bounce slightly.
Laura jolted, coughing and spluttering into wakefulness. Turning her head to make eye contact, she scowled at Natasha.
“Time to wake up, you lazy thing,” Natasha said with a hint of amusement. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
Laura’s niece was about to begin her second year of university and didn’t own a car, so Laura and Natasha has pledged their Mercedes to help her move into her dorm. Unfortunately, that commitment came with a four-hour, cross-state drive.
Laura groaned and rubbed her eyes. “Oh… right.” With a sigh, she used her elbows to lever her up into a sitting position. The blankets fell away to reveal naked skin. Her chest heaved just a little with the effort of sitting up.
Natasha had to force herself not to lean in and grab a handful. The site of Laura’s deliciously plump body had never been one that she was able to easily resist, even when the other woman had been 100 pounds lighter and only slightly overweight.
But mindful of the time, she gave Laura’s gut one last, affectionate pat and said, “We’d better shake our overfed asses, or we’ll be late.”

“Ugh, yes, I guess so...” Laura swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up with a sigh of exertion, giving Natasha a rather pleasant view of her ass. Although sizeable, the muscles had long-since begun to atrophy from lack of use, giving it something of a v-shape, rather than the rounded peach-shape of a healthier person’s rear.
“Fuck, that view is distracting,” muttered Natasha, feeling her face redden.
Laura turned around, triggering a highly appealing ripple of fat, and struck a playful, sexy pose.
“I know,” Laura said with a smirk. She departed for the shower with an extra wiggle of her hips, Natasha tilting her head for a better view.
As the bathroom door closed behind Laura, Natasha unlocked her phone, opening the emails app. It was busy season in the world of real estate, and bargain basement interest rates meant that even the pandemic was doing little to dampen buyers enthusiasm.
An alarming collection of messages had accumulated since Natasha left work the night before, and she set to work either deleting or replying to them. But thoughts of Laura, wet and naked in the shower, kept intervening.
After the third time her hand started to slide between her legs, Natasha sighed and flung the covers off. She and Laura would be late that morning.
The bathroom door squeaked as Natasha opened it. Through the steam of the shower, she saw Laura’s silhouette turn to look, and then swing the glass door open: an invitation.
Natasha pulled her pajama shirt over her head, feeling her belly wobble as she moved. She pulled down her flannel pants and kicked them off, breathing heavily as she straightened up. Distantly, it occurred to her that she had become so out of shape that taking her clothes off left her feeling slightly breathless, and she wondered if, like Natalie Portman, her arteries were becoming caked in yellow plaque. She suspected they were.
***
If taking her pajama pants off had raised alarm bells about how out of shape Natasha was, trying to have shower sex set off a fog horn. 
Leaning against the shower wall and grinding against Laura’s talented fingers, it had been just seconds before Natasha could feel her heart begin to start pounding--not with arousal, but with exertion. 
As her breathing became more laboured, her legs had begun to feel weak and wobbly. She asked so little of them that they were struggling to cope with the mild exertion, she had realized.
The experience did nothing to dampen her arousal, but as her enjoyment grew, she realized that she had to stop; she simply could not keep up.
“Hang on a sec,” she had panted weakly, turning to face Laura. The blonde’s face had been red as a tomato, and she too was breathing heavily. Although, Natasha noted with bemusement, nowhere near as heavily as her.
“Switch to the bed?” she had asked between gasps.
“Yeah,” Natasha had laughed.
***
After they had finished, Natasha chuckled tiredly. “Wow, okay. So... that’s where we’re at fitness-wise.”
Natasha was laying on her back, legs open. She knew from experience that Laura’s head would be resting on her folded arms, not far from where her tongue had been moments earlier. But the other woman’s face was hidden behind a mound of smooth, brown belly fat. The curve of adipose rose and fell with Natasha’s still-laboured breathing.
“Are you surprised?” Laura asked cheekily. “Girl, I can barely climb a flight of stairs. And you get out of breathing putting on your shoes!”
“Well yeah!” Natasha said. “I’m morbidly obese, if you didn’t notice. Bending down is not my friend.”
“I certainly did notice,” Laura smirked. She reached up and gave Natasha’s lower belly a firm shake, sending a ripple across her fatty abdomen. Natasha let out a contented sigh.
“Considering what both our hearts probably look like, I’m sort of proud of us for making it as far as we did,” Natasha mused.
There was a general agreement between the two women, mostly unspoken but bolstered by the warnings of their doctor, that they were almost certainly both nursing cases of incipient heart disease.
“Mine feels pretty clogged at the moment,” Laura agreed, bemusedly. “Not surprising, I guess.”
“Definitely not.”
Lately, Natasha had been noticing a feeling a pressure in her chest more and more. Her doctor said the sensation was just high blood pressure, and she believed him, but still, she knew it was not a healthy sign. She could feel that pressure now, and felt inspired to share: “You fucked me so good my chest hurts.”
Laura looked up narrowed her eyes playfully, “Shall we add some more strain for that heart of yours?”
“Yes...” Natasha exhaled in anticipation. “We shall...” And Laura’s fingers entered her again.

Okay, this is the conclusion, with an epilogue to go. Its pretty short and is...okay its got weight swapping by a magnitude of tons but its probably more horrific than erotic.
 
On groaning, squealing wheels, Tessa was pushed into the tower’s bottom story. 
 
Some of the shapeless rolls that had begun life as love handles scraped the door frame, for although wide the once spritely actress was girthier than even the normal inhabitants of this place of lard. Once she was in the cold, dark stone room (surely wider on the inside than the outside) Lincoln piroutted past her, dancing and spinning like a prima ballerina who happened to weigh over a quarter ton.
 
“See, she’s completely fine, I even kept her entertained!” Lincoln laughed maniacally.
 
A surprisingly modern projector beamed images onto a far wall, a black and white movie starring a young and stunning Lillian Lincoln. The curvaceous starlet on film was in a tight dress, the camera focused on the bouncing rippling perfection of her glorious ass in an endless loop. Tessa realized belatedly that there was a seated figure with her back to her, chained to the chair by heavy links of rusted iron. The real life Lincoln’s piggish hands seized the top of the chair and spun it over with surprising strength, displaying its occupant.
 
Tessa screamed, a hoarse shrill that soon turned into panicked coughing for her abused body couldn’t stand such mild exertion.
 
What sat chained in the chair was a shriveled mummy. Its skin was the color of a walnut, limbs and torso caved in and sunken, withered to resemble jerky. The face was a terror, lips, nose and ears gone but worst of all were the eyes. Living blue eyes that were held open with clips, their watery blue spheres leaking tears.
 
“She’s not as lovely as she used to be, but don’t hate her just because she’s gone to seed,” Lincoln giggled, a new chin popping into being from her jowls as she kept growing.
 
The ancient actress spun gracefully to the pillar the projector was on, knocking it over with a thick hand. Her fingers began to glow as she touched the top of the pillar, while her still inflating ass cheeks began to sag and flap towards the floor. Somewhere gears began to turn and the entire floor began to fall, an elevator.
 
“Where are we going?’ Tessa panted, the strange chocolate creatures that were her trainers spinning her around.
 
Over the slope of her bed sized stomach, Tessa could see Kat and Rachel on their own platforms held up by the chocolate nightmares. Kat’s breasts were each the size of a grown man, their dinner plate nipples rissing so high on her bulging gut to block off view of her face. Rachel’s couch sized ass cheeks pushed her higher by contrast, the pears’ blobby lower half attached to a merely severely morbidly obese top. The singer’s blue eyes were glazed over, either she was drugged or her sanity had truly snapped.
 
“I told you not five minutes ago, can’t you remember? We’re going to see the goddess you fucking twit!” Lincoln giggled as the stone walls of the shaft shot past and her ass cheeks smacked onto the floor, the actress leaning back on them to rest, fat pushing her higher and higher as the cellulite sprawled across the floor, “the mother of all! She who Hungers! To her will go the pitiful fat of the lesser sacrifices, those who failed to embrace her bounty! And to the one who excelled, who grew fatter and larger than any...hahaaahahaha, she will receive another serving of magic and youth!”
 
Tessa was near as fat as any woman who’d ever lived then, but Lillian Lincoln, hour glass star of the silver screen, was far fatter still. LIncoln swelled with sixty years of round the clock gluttony, the long hidden fat returning to find its place by the ton. The magic pulsing through her kept her alive but even her unnatural strength and grace ran out, pinning the blonde to the stone disc.
 
Acres of ass lard were spilling over the stone, the adipose lake stopping just before the bed holding tessa. Her ass cheeks and hips were wider than a truck each, folded over in piles of dimpled, stretch marked fat, legs swallowed up in the sprawl. Her gut was near as Tessa’s car and her breasts each the size of an entire cheer leader, her features swallowed in facial lard, brow fat covering her eyes and nose until only her gaping, laughing maw remained.
 
Had she the breath to spare, Tessa would have screamed herself but she didn’t, her heart thundering in panic that only rose as the elevator shaft ended and the platform kept falling. Suspended on nothing, they hung in the middle of an infinite blackness, a void that continued forever in all directions...until it did not.
 
The cruel eyed painting of fair Freya in the main dining room did not do its inspiration justice, for Freya had muscle and sinew. Nor did any soft limbed sculpture the Greeks had ever done of Hera. The petty human faces the ancients had put onto She Who Hungered were just attempts to calm themselves, to reassure themselves that there was something understandable listening to them, Tessa knew.
 
A bright and educated woman, the actress knew that what she saw couldn’t exist. Nothing so large, continental or perhaps even planetary in size could actually be real. Gut rolls higher than mountain ranges and wider than nations had to be imagined, lard crevices deeper than the oceanic abyss had to be fantasies and tits larger than oceans had to be fake. Nothing alive could be so shapelessly huge, so monumentally round and completely devoid of features, just endless fat piled upon endless fat and yet alive!
 
Yet it wasn’t fake and any hope of ...anything was leaving Tessa’s mind as she saw. 
 
She Who Hungered was before her, gluttony given form.
 
“Great Goddess! Magna Mater! I exult to bring you gifts! Three weak ones for you to devour!” the shapeless pile that was Lincoln cackled, “Y’hvun! Uch’at Uch’at! Yaraghouv ryhll ivwq qi’navunar!”
 
Nothing stirred at the Priestess’ words, perhaps this monstrosity was too large to move even for omnipotence, but the platform began to slow and Tessa felt a burning heat around her, a pink mist pulling from her pale skin and spinning towards the living planetoid of She Who Hungered. In the heat, the chocolate servants shimmered, lost their human guises and melted, becoming fudge lake. She looked down, seeing that her limbs were at last shrinking, the helpless blob she’d become fading back. The hundreds of pounds she’d gained by misspoken spell went first, leaving her merely obese, able to actually move. 
 
Scrambling, the actress fell off the bed and almost off the platform. Hanging on with pudgy fingers, she looked down to see that they hovered over some sea sized flab fold of the Goddess and that a squamous mass sprawled on it. Not a freckle or mole but...what had been women, a pile of the shriveled, living corpse things that Lincoln had turned her predecessor Remington into, their eyes staring up at her with terror, pleading her to help. Bobbing up and down in a literal river of sweat, there were nearly two hundred of them, three or four actresses or models or singers a year lured to this hell, fattened up and thrown into endless agony.
 
Something snapped inside Tessa’s brain, a rubber band pulled to the extreme and past that, the knowledge of mudanity destroyed as the true reality was made manifest.
 
“ha...hahaahahhahaHAHAHAHA!,” the British woman cackled, hazel eyes glowing with madness, “they do all lose weight! They do and they never gain it back! Thank God I came to the right place!”
 
Laughing maniacally, she pushed herself up easily, being only the two hundred or so pounds she’d been before eating that chocolate monstrosity in the garden. She walked bare towards the pile that was Remington, stopping only to grab handfuls of the chocolate goop and smear crude runes across her body. Past Kat Downton she went, the top model looking just a bit plump and past Rachel Fast she walked, the singer just a bit thick in the thighs. 
 
“Mortenson, Mortenson, I must thank you Doctor,” Tessa giggled as she started climbing up the sweaty hillock that had been the cultist, “I’m losing weight by the moment!”
 
Using her natural grace and the athleticism that came from years of yoga and exercise, the slender actress pulled herself up the blobs of belly blubber, resting across Lincoln’s tits at her A-list red carpet weight. Fat she didn’t have to lose continued burning off as Tessa’s slim fingers pushed up the fold of brow fat covering the blonde’s blue eyes.
 
“What, what get down!” Lincoln gasped to see Tessa’s gaunt face, the bone’s of the British woman’s face clear to see, “You’re ruining my ritual!”
 
Tessa Holmes laughed, a laugh that began in her collapsed belly and went up her protruding rib cage to exit her skeletal face.
 
“Your ritual!? You forget yourself! No, it’s her ritual and you aren’t fat enough for her tastes!” Tessa laughed in the helpless, prone Mortenson’s face, dried lips splitting as she did, “Fthnght!”
 
It was the same spell Tessa had learned by fate and accident, an enchantment that made all the fat from the nearest pear shaped woman disappear and reappear onto its speaker. Lincoln’s blue eyes widened in panic as Tessa leaned forwards, lips wrapping around her tormentor’s in a hideous kiss. In a few heart beats the gaunt Brit was again the picture of slender health, then a curvy young woman and then noticeably chubby. Second by second Tessa gained, soon fat as she’d been on entering the Black lodge, then fat as she’d been after eating the actress, then back up to an immobilized blob. She fell forwards onto the shrinking Lillian Lincoln, her fingers hooked onto the decreasing shoulders of her victimizer turned victim. 
 
Tessa felt the balance shift, felt her self growing bigger than Lincoln. She felt every inch of her whale like expanse, the hip heaviness of her genetics given room to gallop as it immobilized her. Laughing into the screaming Lincoln’s mouth at the thought, she was soon pressing down onto a merely immobile Lincoln and then saw nothing as her fat brow covered her eyes.
 
Panicking, Lillian Lincoln managed to break free of Tessa’s grip as her arms became vestigial, pinnined by her own side fat and shoulder bulk. Chunky as she’d been at 34, the bottom heavy blonde slipped and slid down the layers of lard that had been hers a moment earlier. She tried to scream the counter spell, but the tumbling fall onto Tessa’s sweaty fat pond of a body wasn’t over. Lillian went tumbling over the side of the platform, slamming into the rippling swamp of lard that was She Who Hungered’s body.
 
“Goddess, help me, please!” Lincoln screamed, her slightly chubby limbs writhing to stay afloat and sheathed in a pink haze as she kept shrinking and shriveling, “I served you, I served you so much!”
 
Prayers unanswered, Lillian Lincoln began sinking into the shallow sea of sweat. For a moment, her body was perfectly curvaceous before it withered and shriveled.

Sorry for the inundation, but I realised I hadn't posted these chapters on Curvage out of ditziness. So here you go and... Merry Christmas... I guess?

Love all the guesses, some of them are going to be revealed soon...
Bad news has a way of arriving in waves, particularly when the first piece puts you into an absolutely shitty mood.
 
“While surely few are unfamiliar with Miss Holmes’ other performances, what unique promise she once showed is not apparent. While recreating the vocal requirements for recreating a classical animated musical in live action cannot be fully expected for a performer with only minor experience in music,” a particularly snide review said,”the constant auto tuning of her voice never failed to take away from the film. More surprising, the previously lauded Holmes turned in a performance that is both low energy and oddly bloated. She seemed particularly distracted, uncomfortable and even disinterested in her role during most scenes, including the ending dance number where she acted most unenergetic. Given the rumors of her immense pay day for the Disney spectacle, a reviewer must question is this the most she can offer?”
 
“Fucking reporters,” Tessa fumed, throwing the news paper acros the living room of her luxury apartment to thud between cast photos, “no wonder print media is dying…”
 
The actress’ missile knocked one of the photos from the wall. With a groan and a grunt she got up, feeling her shirt pull over her stomach. She tugged the tight cotton down over the bulge as she got to the photo, a post-wrap pick from one of her first adult roles. Posed between less successful co-stars, the then nineteen year old Tessa looked flawless, her near perfect legs displayed by tiny jean shorts and her washboard stomach on display in a crop top. One of her first beers was in one slender hand.
 
“Ugh, why did you have to drink that, fat ass?” the twenty seven year old Tessa grumbled to herself.
 
Right now, Tessa was wearing a skin tight pair of leggings that she’d squeezed into after a late breakfast just to get her mail. They stuck to her legs like sausage skins, highlighting the thickness of her thighs and bisected her not so little pooch. They didn’t rip only because the actress’ rather flat ass was already hanging out of them.
 
“And no wonder I looked uncomfortable, I was in two pairs of spanx to get back into that dress,” she grumbled, trying to get the leggings to stop squeezing.
 
Her last film had been a real night mare shoot. Lots of CGI to pretend to react to. Lots of choreographed dance numbers and lots of singing which she’d practiced for for months. It had been stressful and Tessa had used the catering table to burn off that stress, toss in the five extra pounds she’d picked up on vacation in the Bahamas before shooting and her costumes had been tight. On wrapping she’d really gorged, pigging out and drinking to relieve the tiredness...and then there’d been reshoots. The studio had decided the director wasn’t good enough and demanded forty five minutes of an hour and a half film be reshot. Thankfully she hadn’t been cast as a disney princess with an exposed midriff and spanx and a corset had been enough to hide the paunch the twenty five pounds had given her. Still, doing the climatic action scene and the dancing scene in those fabric torture chambers had been miserable and the picture of her on the catering table labelled “Do not serve” had been unnecessary. 
 
“And it wasn’t my idea to be auto tuned, I practiced for weeks,” Tessa grumbled, plopping back onto the couch and looking at the next letter.
 
It was a check from the studio.
 
“Fuck, those bastards, what do they mean, weight gain clause fine? Five hundred thousand dollars?” the brunette fumed.
 
It wasn’t unexpected. Tessa wasn’t an effortless waif anymore, her tendency towards drinking had started piling pounds around her midsection once she turned twenty. Despite frequently using a personal trainer she’d been fighting a personal battle of the bulge ever since and losing, she’d started her 20s as a size two and had started her last film as a snug size eight. And this wasn’t the first film where she’d shown up a pant size bigger, she was getting a reputation as unreliable. Roles had been starting to get a bit harder to get as word got out she put on weight easily and this wasn’t going to help. 
 
“Those fucks, I should sue for only getting...fuck,” Tessa’s brown eyes bulged, reading over the rest of the lines.
 
The check was just for the merchandising rights from dolls and stickers and toys and lunch boxes in her image, just from the first weeks of the ad campaign.
 
“Five million dollars?” the actress gasped.
 
It was a fortune. Add that to the vast amounts from her childhood role sitting in her accounts, forget the money made in between, and she’d be set for life. Never having to work again, the type of pay day an actress dreamed of…
 
“Is that, that can’t be right,” she stammered, pulling open her phone.
 
An email from her agent was on it, headlined “Is this real? We need to talk?”. The attachment was of Tessa out and about not too much earlier, her stomach distinctly rounded and her sharp chin doubled. No amount of pride was enough to say it was a bad angle, and the head line “Tessa Holmes, Pregnant!?” stung.
 
She looked away from the phone, past the check on the coffee table and the bad review on the floor. Hanging on the door was the dress she’d ordered for the premier, a luxurious piece of sustainable fashion:a jet black bandage dress with an absolutely tiny waist line. One she’d have struggled to get into with spanx when filming had started, twenty pounds ago. Why she’d ordered something so snug was beyond her, there was no way it was going to fit. Tessa could see the headlines about bumps now, at best, otherwise they might just call her fat…
 
“I’ll show them fat,” she muttered, googling the nearest take out place.
 
……
 
The memory wasn’t real.
 
Tessa had to tell herself that as she struggled into a pair of sweat pants.
 
The memory wasn’t real, she hadn’t had a weight problem on set. She’d started getting head aches, bad ones, and it had turned out that she needed an operation as soon as filming wrapped. That was why she’d missed the premiere, not because she was fat but because she’d had brain cancer. Yes, the review of her auto tuned singing, done without her input, had stung, but she hadn’t decided to eat herself obese from it.
 
“Come on, get up,” she whispered to herself, trying to get the draw string tied up by feel, sucking in her stomach hard as she could just to see her fingers.
 
This fat was real but it wasn’t from a self hating eating binge. This...twice her old weight and more of dough was all from someone else, from this insane place. She’d never struggled with her weight until days ago, never had a problem with over eating and never hated herself and even if she had, getting a little chubby was so much better than getting sick that the hypnosis memory was laughable. That was why she’d suggested that option to Mortenson, hoping even then that she could cling to the contradiction of what had really happened.
 
Had it worked?
 
Well, the memory had. Tessa remembered the hypnosis implant but she remembered reality too. And Mortenson had yet to suspect her, something Tessa had feared all throughout a long day of over eating. The doctor had treated her like a pig, all day long, talking openly around her to the trainers about how hefty Tessa was getting and how quickly. That she was a prize gainer, primed to expand. That would have been motivation enough to escape, even if the actress hadn’t been able to compare her weight gain with Rachel and Cat’s to find that she was rapidly catching up to the for now heavier women.
 
“I am not, not that fat,” she whispered to herself, looking down at the hefty, globular gut that blocked her hands from view.
 
Sucking in her stomach hadn’t worked. Tessa was beyond the point she could have a flat stomach or even just a paunchy stomach by sucking in. Her gut was a full keg of saggy beer weight, humiliating to bear around. She couldn’t see her feet anymore beneath its bulk, having to guess which shoe to shove her feet into. The gut sprawled across her lap when sitting and sagged when standing, a crease half way formed across it at the navel.
 
“...I am that fat,” the actress said, walking towards the mirror to tie up her pants.
 
Not that she really needed too. Although her legs and butt weren’t gaining much in comparison they were still thick and lardy, legs looking clumsy compared to their old delicate nature while her hips were curiously shapeless despite having once been a bit pronounced. Tessa had always had a butt that picked up mass easily and her mother had been a hip heavy woman since turning forty, but whatever Mortenson had done had changed the way the short haired brunette carried weight.
 
No, the reason Tessa looked in the mirror was to see how bad her gain was.
 
And it was pretty bad.
 
Quite frankly, the actress didn’t recognize herself. She was big and beefy and flabby, her gut sagging forwards enough she didn’t even stand the same. The shape of her face had changed as a third chin had grown in, obliterating delicate features and her body looked like it belonged to a different person. A woman five or six years older given the sag of her heavier tits, near F cups that had lost any youthful perk.
 
Tessa was noticeably fatter than she’d been that morning, probably closer to three hundred pounds than two hundred now. The swelling from her afternoon gorging and feeding had gone down, through some sort of...she didn’t know, dark magic or insane technology it had turned instantly into fat rather than killing her.
 
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered, “while I still can.”
 
She opened the wardrobe, finding it occupied by a black jacket she didn’t remember buying. Maybe this was why her memory of what she’d been wearing to the studio and then to here kept changing, perhaps they’d put something looser into her wardrobe at home so she wouldn’t notice the first pounds that drugged food had put on her. Or maybe she’d just forgotten and was going paranoid as well as insane. She slid the jacket on, flabby arms tight in the holes and gut too big to zip up the front.
 
But it was better than just the thin t-shirt she was wearing, which didn’t fit well either. She was up in the mountains and the air was cold at night, she assumed, so she grabbed the blanket off of her bed too and wrapped it over her shoulders. The clothes in her dresser were now up to a frightening size eighteen and tight as a chinese finger trap. Tessa was grateful that they’d gone up a size during the day, instead of at night, both because she could fit into them and because she wasn’t going to be noticed.
 
At least, Tessa hoped.
 
Padding to the door, leaving behind portraits of an obese Aphrodite being bullied by her hand maidens and a defeated Athena being force fed by a giantess, the actress put her ear to the heavy wood door. Holding her breath, she listened for any noises, such as a trainer breathing outside in the hall. Her plan had initially been to go out the window and climb down, but the windows were narrow and Tessa was now decidedly wide in every direction. When none came, she slowly, quietly opened the door...into her own belly.
 
“You’re kidding me,” Tessa fumed internally, rubbing the red mark that had appeared where crystal door knob had smacked into tender gut, “I’m losing this when I get home, I don’t care if i need lipo!”
 
On paper, no one was more experienced at sneaking around old, probably haunted magical castles than Tessa Holmes. But the last time she’d done that was over ten years and now, a hundred and forty pounds ago. She wasn’t a rail thin teen who could run for ever, but a vastly overweight, horribly out of shape near thirty year old who wasn’t even sure if she could run.
 
And of course, her star making film series had all been pretend. No one had really been there to catch her if it wasn’t in the script and that castle’s rooms and hallways had only had three doors. The Black Mountain Lodge was hideously real and horribly dangerous, if Mortenson or a trainer caught her out after night...well who knows what they’d do. It was enough to make Tessa want to hide back in her room, but this was her best chance.
 
Every day she stayed here, Tessa was gaining at least forty pounds. She was four, or perhaps five days at most from weighing as much as Cat Downton did. The SI model wasn’t just big, she seemed deeply miserable and unhealthy, moving slowly, breathing heavily, sweating constantly. And the chest heavy blonde was famously athletic and six inches taller than Tessa, who wasn’t exactly strong going into this.
 
So, forced by fear and shivering with trepidation, the actress stepped into the hallway to find...nothing.
 
Black Mountain Lodge’s residential hallway was dark and quiet as the grave. No muscular trainer waited to grab her up and strap her into a feeding machine. Dr. Mortenson didn’t stand by with magic ready to blast her soul to hell and her body to immobility. No ghostie or ghoulie or long leggedy beasty waited to bite her and the most dangerous thing was Tessa’s sensitive gut bumping into some side table or decoration.
 
That didn’t stop the place from being incredibly creepy.
 
Tessa slowly walked through the hallway, heart hammering from fear. The only sound was the brush of her thighs and the breath she was trying to keep calm. She crept low as she could to the ground, back and knees already starting to complain at stalking about with an extra hundred and seventy pounds on her body. The hallway was long, studded with unused rooms, but it still felt like it took hours to get through in the dark.
 
A cold sweat was on her pale skin by the time she reached the massive main room of the Lodge, only the low glow of the fire place lighting the room. Tessa scanned for any sort of guard for a long minute, letting her breathing get under control and finding no obvious guard. Slowly, she tip toed down the stairs, finding no more danger than being an obese woman on a stair case. Reaching the bottom, finding her mouth sand dry, Tessa tip toed towards the vast double doors, big enough to resist a battering ram.
 
Hand trembling, a wordless prayer to a God she didn’t normally believe in dropping off of her lips, Tessa pushed on the door handle...which swung silently open.
 
“Is it, that easy?” she whispered to herself, carefully stepping outside.
 
It seemed it was that easy, Tessa standing alone before the vast mansion on a chilly, moon lit night. There’d been no alarms she could hear, no guards, not even a locked door. It seemed that just the mind control drugs were used to keep the guests in check. And for whatever reason, that hadn’t worked on Tessa like it had on the others...which brought a small stab of guilt to her chest. Rachel was a friend of hers and while Downton seemed as demanding as she’d once been gorgeous, she didn’t deserve to be fattened to that size.
 
“I’ll call the FBI as soon as I get to a phone,” Tessa said, setting off down the drive, “and get someone to believe I’m me.”
 
The actress had been half expecting to be caught by this point. As to actually escaping, her plan had been a night time walk as fast as she could manage down the miles long drive and then down the road until she found someone, anyone willing to pick up a blanket wrapped fat woman on the road at night. It was risky as hell for a hundred reasons, but she was already kidnapped wasn’t she? What were the odds of getting kidnapped twice, especially as she wasn’t cute as a button anymore?
 
For a few minutes, the only sound was her sneakers on the pavement, her fogging breath in the air and the swish-swish of her thighs.
 
Then the howling started.
 
A long, high pitched and mournful howl across the starry sky. Tessa immediately froze, mind going to the grizzly trophies in the main room of the lodge. Were there wolves in California? Was she even in California?
 
More howls started, sounding closer and closer. She tried to tell herself that they were miles off, until she saw down in the forest of chocolate trees, a set of glowing, animal eyes reflecting in the darkness. Tessa gulped, a shiver running down her spine. She’d had a dog as a kid, a white little terrier named Princess Fluffy but these eyes were at waist height.
 
And soon others joined them.
 
“Shit, shit shit,” she gasped, eyes going around the darkness for a way out.
 
The lodge was behind her, a green house to the left and the hedge maze to the right. Going back into the lodge seemed to defeat the point, but it was better than getting eaten by wolves. Maybe she could hide or something...shit they were getting closer...Tessa turned around, seeing another set of glowing canine eyes coming through the gap between the vast lodge and the green house.
 
“Into the maze it is,” she gasped, hurrying as fast as her obese body would let her. 
 
There was a gate on the hedge maze, one that thankfully wasn’t locked. She closed it behind herself, then realized that it was a pretty short and flimsy thing a wolf could probably go over in its sleep. She ran into the maze as another howl split the air, knowing how stupid it was to hide from the hunting animal that blood hound’s descended from. 
 
Running through the dark, Tessa wasn’t instantly out of breath, she got a few hundred turning yards into the maze before she had to stop, heart feeling like it would explode. Another howl sounded, farther away and was echoed by another that sounded farther too.
 
“Fuck, thank God…,” Tessa said to herself, wiping her brow, “Jesus, I don’t want to be eaten…where the fuck am I?”
 
The hedges loomed over her, dark and disturbing. It had been dark in the house but this seemed even darker. Tessa was a city girl, the full dark of a mountain night was disturbing beyond belief even if she wasn’t in some insane asylum fat farm. Swallowing, she turned around, walking straight into a tall, hard figure.
 
“Fuck!” she yelped, falling on her back and sure a trainer was on her.
 
But the shadowy figure didn’t move an inch, just standing there as Tessa looked from the gravelly path. As her heart beat slowly stopped, she realized it was a statue. Cursing her fear, the heavy set actress began the laborious task of standing up, hand pushing off the ground. By chance, she put her hand on the pocket of her jacket, finding something long and hard in it.
 
“What, what have I got in my pocket?” she asked herself, carefully pulling six inches of hard metal with a rubber grip on it.
 
It shook slightly as she held it and her thumb found a button that did nothing. Tessa realized it was a survival flash light, the kind you could shake up and down for a charge. Blessing her luck and wondering how it had gotten into her pocket, she shook it up and down for a long moment, the fat in her arm and face and gut jiggling uncomfortably. Muscle fatigue already shot through her arm and the actress was glad that a press of her thumb revealed a very bright beam.


 
“I didn’t have a flashlight in this jacket, hell I didn’t have a jacket,” the actress said, hand going to the other pockets.

 
In one of them was a pocket knife. Small and foldable, but an actual way to defend herself. In the other was a slim billfold, what a woman would wear while jogging. Tessa flipped it open, pointing the flash light at a British driver’s license. The photo on it was of an absolutely gorgeous woman in her late twenties, with a chiseled face and short brown hair.
 
“Evelyn Stone,” Tessa breathed.
 
Cat, in her rant, had said that Evelyn Stone had been here. And been over five hundred pounds, on a motor scooter that barely worked, and very much not the 115lb waif this driver’s license said. Had this been her jacket? Had she been in Tessa’s room before her?
 
“Another actress, my predecessor,” Tessa muttered, “that’s what Mortenson said...but she wasn’t…”
 
Evelyn Stone had been Tessa five years before Tessa, a rail thin British It girl. She’d made her debut in a trilogy of nonsensical Robin Hood movies as a very slender Maid Marian, then earned serious accolades in period pieces and indies. She was famously skinny and gorgeous, then had taken a break to have a kid and fallen off the radar…Tessa vaguely recalled paparazzi rumors of a massive, humiliating weight gain…
 
“No, no she...that’s not a real memory,” she muttered, “she...she’d signed up to play Hero Girl…”
 
A conversation, her agent saying the last actress had had to leave due to a family emergency…
 
“Did...did the studio send her here?” Tessa asked herself, shaking her head.
 
Confused, she looked at the statue with the flash light. Lit up, it was revealed as a bronze statue of a tall, imperious woman in a Edwardian era dress. The statue’s eyes were sharp and imposing, her waistline tiny and probably due to a corset. There was a plaque at her feet, Tessa knelt to read it.
 
“Sarah Remington, founder of this blessed holy sight in the name of ...of F’thsktth? What is that?,” Tessa read, “Seven hundred pounds gained from Equinox to Equinox, 1909. Seven hundred fifty pounds lost from dusk to dawn of All Hallows. Queen of the Wild Hunt, I take up your sigil and begin my vigil until relieved! Defeated and cast down, 1963."
 
It was gibberish. Gaining seven hundred pounds in six months? Losing even more in a single day?
 
It was insane.
 
But then again, Tessa had been a waif a week earlier.
 
Curiosity getting the better of her, the actress followed the curve of the maze. She found it was no maze at all, but in fact a labyrinth, circling in on itself. Every few feet was a statue, the garb slowly getting more modern. She didn’t recognize any of the names but the massive amount of weight gained and lost didn’t change. Although they lacked the oath that Remington had had.
 
What was this, the actress pondered as the statues went on, some sort of cult? 
 
“Who would do this too...no…,” Tessa gasped to herself.
 
She’d gotten deep into the maze. Deep enough her flabby legs hurt and her side burned from a stitch. The actress was breathing hard, needed a drink and was realizing that at this size, in this condition she sure as hell wasn’t making it down the ten mile drive way.
 
“This isn’t, its her,” the actress said, running the flash light up and down the statue.
 
This statue of a woman was absolutely gorgeous and impossibly shapely, wearing a skin tight dress and high heels to hide her short stature. Round, womanly hips worthy of a rap video. Pert, DD tear drops worthy of a playboy centerfold. An absolutely tiny waistline that made Tessa at her leanest seem a bit thick.
 
And although she wore no glasses, had her hair down and a smile on her face, it was Dr. Mortenson as sure as Tessa was British.
 
“Lillian Lincoln,” Tessa hissed, “I...I knew she looked familiar damn it!”
 
One of the most famous actresses and sex symbols who’d ever lived. Tessa had seen a few of her old movies in acting classes, finding the brainless sex bunny portrayal boring and worthless...even as the sapphic part of her found the copious TnA disturbingly attractive. But Lillian Lincoln was dead, dead for sixty years in a car crash…
 
“Lillian Lincoln, gained eight hundred pounds from September to October, 1963. Lost eight hundred fifty pounds and claimed the jewel on All Hallows Eve,” Tessa breathed to herself, “Queen of this land and High Priestess, forever more…”

Dizzying, head-spinning stuff once more. It feels like a board game at times, and at other times it feels a lot, lot creepier. Sucky is a fantastic beast though. I know she's an amoral succubus with weird powers and what have you, but I would choose her over any of the other girls any day of the week

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.
 

This is a really nice comment. Genuinely flattering and kind. Thank you

This is art.  Plain and simple, art.  You have captured so many of the cyclical nuances of tension and release inherent in weight gain.  Just beautiful.

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.
 

Part 13 - Chinese finger trap

It was all going so well. Until they called the police.
But we’ll get to that later.
First… stuffing time.

+

You ever hear of the Chinese finger trap? I didn’t know that was the name of it until I googled it, but I would recognise one of those fuckers from fifteen parsecs away. We had them when I was just a ragtag scoundrel back in Primary school, and maybe I’m showing my Millennial age but they were all the fucking rage. Like fidget spinners… only nothing like fidget spinners.
The way a Chinese finger trap works is that you put it over somebody’s fingers - such japes - and then you pull until it tightens over the finger. Now, because we were all pre-teens and thus had the collective IQ of a bag of wet cement, the trick would work. Because, to remove the finger trap from your finger, your instinct is to pull it. How else to take something off, right? Nuh-huh, not the Chinese finger trap. Cos the Chinese finger trap is a trap. For your finger. It’s kinda where it gets its name from, I imagine.
So, you pull. You pull the Chinese finger trap and all that does is make the trap constrict tighter around your finger. It’s totally counter-intuitive, but you’re so young that you still watch cartoons (my yogi ex-boyfriend still watched cartoons when he was in his late 20’s. I’m counting that weird Japanese shit as cartoons), so the counter-intuition flummoxes you. You’re bam to the boozled. The more you pull, the tighter it gets. The tighter it gets, the more you panic and want it off. The more you panic and want it off? Yup, the more you pull. Until you end up crying and someone has to intervene to pacify you of your fraught emotional duress.
Well, imagine all of that… but with sex.
Good, right?
Okay, I use the Chinese finger trap method for our fucking and feeding sessions. I don’t try to enjoy it. I don’t lean into it. I resist. I writhe. Every mouthful is an aberration, every touch is an abomination. I can’t possibly fit any more inside of me (this works for feeding or fucking). Please… please… let me go. I can’t cope. Please….
The more you resist, the more our resident Chinese finger trap - Maria Echeverria, mother of dragons - constricts. The more the noose tightens. She feeds you more fiercely, she fucks you more vindictively. And vindictive is the word. She gets pleasure from your pain. Not necessarily with whips and such like - though not necessarily without whips and such like either - but it’s the muchness of it all. The excess. The overabundance. So much eating, so much fucking. And the more you pull, the tighter it gets. So you can’t cope, you’re straining, well passed maximum capacity. So you pull away more. And she tightens more. Punishes you more. Until each breath hurts. So you resist more. So she tightens more. Until you end up crying and Maria has to intervene to pacify me of my emotional duress. I really am that pre-teen child in the playground still.
Well, we’d been doing this a bit and it was getting results. Results that include orgasms so intense that it makes food taste weird for at least 48 hours later. And massive weight gain. Both of which, I have become somewhat partial to, no word of a lie.
My eye hadn’t been on my own size ever since the epiphany about Maria’s gain. Maybe it should have been. I’d been ballooning like billy-o. The biggest indicators were how devil red my stretch marks were looking. Like Satan’s talons clawing at my thighs, the underside of my stomach and near every other part of me. I didn’t mind. Fuck, I loved it. It was intoxicating to be pushed so relentlessly, suffocated by the sheer waterfall deluge of it all. To be in the eye of Maria’s storm.
And yet I was distracted by hers. It was so marginal by contrast. Just hinted at always, elliptic and impossible to confirm. Were her thighs more substantial? Was her chest always so swollen? Did her sides form slight rolls every time she sat down, before? They were whispers of weight gain, lost in the heavy metal roar of my own thrashing expansion.
This was the routine, really. It was almost balanced. Almost healthy. Okay, it was clearly neither of things by normal people’s standards. But through our own deranged perspective, things were reaching a degree of equilibrium. Of calm. Wild, hedonistic, head-throwing-back and back-spasming calm. The best kind of calm, if I may say so.
We’d also been dabbled in the ol’ Maria destruction dance. Like with the monk, you remember the monk right? Yeah, we were still doing that. Oussami bought him and Maria a house to live in with money he didn’t have. Gladstone dissolved his company so he could elope with Maria in Ibiza. Unfortunately for him, his wife had done the same with her company and they were disappointed to find only each other and that the other was cheating too. Selina sold a kidney so she could afford a wedding with Maria that The Abyss had no intention of attending. Charles had sex with his own mother on camera because it would please Maria. He didn’t know that the email address he sent it to was not so much Maria’s as a journalist at The S*n.
I felt a bit left out of all these things. There was rarely much need for me. I could man the camera (woman the camera, surely?). I could watch. I could keep the other half occupied with a social call while Maria plundered their soul. But my beauty was no longer the conventional type these days. I was getting a bit heavy in the same way a neutron star was getting a bit heavy. Reality was beginning to distort around my edges and Hawking radiation poured from me. I was 270lbs and my chin was sinking in the quicksand of my other chin.
And it was all going so well. Until something gave. And that something was called Mark.
We don’t know his last name. He wasn’t really important. Sure, he tried to call the police on her. Sure he threw everything into disarray. But it wasn’t really Mark’s fault. It was mine. And that was kinda the problem.
One of the games Maria plays is Snog the Stranger. The rules are simple: You see a stranger and snog them. It’s to kill time while I eat Kentucky fried chicken by the literal bucket load. To make it fun, she didn’t pick easy targets. Married men, police officers, that kind of thing. Her favourite thing were couples. She’d walk up to them and snog one in front of the other, let them really get into it while the other half watched in confused shock, and then walk away strutting while they bickered over who she was and why they enjoyed it so much.
Until she tried it on Mark.
Mark was hot. Like, we’re talking Chris levels of hot. Pine, Evans, Hemsworth, and, to a certain but lesser extent, Pratt. All Chrises are hot and Mark was in the same league. His girlfriend was also in the same league, if you’re into that sort of thing. She had that Ariana Grande/Barbie doll thing going on, where she was so skinny that her knees would buckle if she wore a hat, and she wore so much fake tan that Willy Wonka would consider her slave labour. They were hot. And they were about to be Maria’d.
I was busying minding my own business with some deep-fried chicken and heartburn while Maria revved her engines up. I would watch over the rim of one of the buckets as hot greasy slobber dripped down my top. And Maria would do her schtick. She got up off the chair and lasered in on her target. With that walk she has. She had this walk, you see? A walk that involved an impossible amount of sway. Hips swinging like a Newton’s cradle from side to side so she could get one foot in front of the other. Head at a slight angle, bizarrely accentuating the impossibly perfect symmetry of her face. That was her walk. Like she owned the place. Like it didn’t matter whether she owned the place or not, she was in charge.
She drew towards him and plunged her icy fingers around him and pushed in. She pushed in, pressing herself against him while Ariana Tiny watched with her mouth so wide she could give an Ent a blowjob. And then it started to go wrong.
“What the fuck?”
He pulled away from her as soon as she leaned in. She looked at him with the same look of confusion that a dog has when you pretend to throw a ball but really it’s still in your hand. Nobody had ever “what the fuck?”-ed her before. Which, given how she spent her days, was impressive. But this left her reeling.
“Oh, pretending you don’t want it, how cute” she said, before going back in.
“No. Fuck off. I don’t even know you, you weird bitch” he said, pulling away from her again and contorting his face into a broken omelette of disgust.
“Come on Mark, let’s call the police” the little dumb blonde thing said.
“Why? The police?” Maria’s eyebrows crumpled in worry, not sure if they meant the band The Police or The Metropolitan Police Force. Neither would be good
“Cos that’s sexual assault, you crazy bitch!”
And Maria walked away, shell-shocked.

+

I remember that afternoon like it was yesterday. I remember sitting in the living room while she paced like it was yesterday. It was actually three hours ago, but it felt like only yesterday.
That strutted walk of hers was wearing down the carpet as I sat and ate another bucket of chicken wings but, this time, to go. Her cheeks reddening with rage. My cheeks reddening with the exertion of finding more room in me for more chicken.
“How fucking dare that shitty little shite!” she raged as grease slobbered down my chin.
“Yeah, shitty shite” I backed her, with my mouth loaded with a poultry farm of cooked bird.
“Probably gay” she rationalised.
“Queer as fuck” I supported.
“But if he was gay, why wouldn’t he kiss me? I turn loads of gay people straight” she continued, grappling with the issue. Then she looked at me and I swallowed. A gentle summer breeze of insecurity drifted over her face. “What happened, Nay-nay?”
She said it with a bathful of acid. But she said it as a cry for help. She looked like she wanted to murder a puppy. But she really wanted an ego boost. For the first time in Maria’s life, she needed an ego boost.
“Maybe resistance is his thing. Like with me and the Chinese finger trap. Maybe batting you off was his fetish and he’s gonna jerk over the dumb blonde thinking about you forcing yourself onto him?” I suggested, drawing from experience.
“So, it’s not because he didn’t like me. It’s because he did?” she said, chewing it over like her mouth was mine and the thought was yet more chicken.
“Why else?”
“Because I’ve gained weight” she said, her eyes on me as I chewed.
And that’s when I knew I was fucked.

+

“Have you?” I said, in a pitch so high it would make dogs bark, glass shatter and Matt Bellamy think it was a bit much. I wouldn’t have convinced a child. Might have burst their eardrum though.
“You. Fucking you did this, didn’t you?”
Her eyes were on me again. Red with smoldering ember. I could feel the warmth of them. I could feel warmth all over. Even my crotch was warm. Especially my crotch, come to think of it.
“No! I do the eating in this household thank you very much” I protested, between bites of evidence.
“Yeah, but you discourage me from going to the gym. You offer me chicken goujons and order in pizza. I haven’t had a steamed vegetable since we did that monk that one time”
I gulped and twisted in my seat a little. And I felt a tingle deep inside.
Look, if I was telling this story again, I’d have told you what she looked like before now. What she looked like when she did that sashaying charge at Mark. What she looked like while she paced with newfound anxiety. What she looked like as she looked at me like she was scanning for which soft tissue organ she was going to rip out and set on fire. And what I would have told you was that she looked hot. I’m no poet, but I realise I should have done that and if I could go back in time and correct it, I would. But I can’t, so I won’t. So, let me tell you what she looked like. Besides, y’know, hot.
She looked hot.
Fuck, let me try again…
She looked hot…
Oh, come on Nay-Nay, stop getting distracted and focus on the wench at large. Issue at large, sorry. You can do this!
She was wearing jeans. She wasn’t really a jeans type of girl, so I had noticed it from the off. She didn’t wear jeans, as a rule. They made her look… mortal. Humans wore jeans, with their debit cards and their mortgages and their subscription to Gardener’s Weekly. Maria wasn’t like that. Maria was superior to that. Except, today she wasn’t.
They were tight as well. I mean, of course, that’s the point of jeans. Nobody likes baggy jeans, apart from Uncle Robert for when he attends those neo-fascism rallies that the family don’t like to talk about and don’t pretend your family doesn’t have an Uncle Robert because all families do. And they all wear baggy jeans. But, for everyone else, jeans are supposed to be suffocating to the point of auto-erotic asphyxiation. They’re supposed to clamp down on you so tight that they leave denim print on your legs. And they were on her, suffocating the lifeblood out of her legs. You could almost see the veins in her legs through them. It was intoxicating.
Less fashionably, but they were also tight around the waist. Tight where the button is supposed to loop through the hole and tight where the zip is supposed to grind its way up those teeth. They hadn’t been closed together, they were clasped. It was vacuum sealed. The kind of tight fit that involves lying on your bed, arching your back into the air like some sort of semi-naked crab, and sucking in like you’re Kirby trying to vanquish your enemies.
And this left her with her first ever muffin top. You could see it through her artfully ruffled black blouse top, a baby’s handful of malleable skin leaning over the vicious hem of denim. And up my eye would travel as I scanned for incriminating signposts of my fattening designs. Breasts so pushed up by an under-sized bra that they pushed horizontally off her chest like Trolltunga before mashing into the underprepared top half of her black blouse. Her arms were smooth now, no inward sculpting between vines of muscle. Even her face was softer. Less vampiric, but no less sexy and no less dangerous.
Anyway, where were we…
Oh yeah, Maria was onto me.
“You did this” she snarled, sitting herself on my knee pressing her nails into my neck.
“Did what?” I gasped, feeling every emotion known to humankind, rupturing through me in an electric thunderclap.
Her face broke for a second into a smile, before sharpening off into her more familiar glare.
“You ruined everything” she seethed.
I don’t remember what I said in response to this, if I’m honest. I just remember forgetting to breathe. I just remember shaking with pleasure.
“You did this” she bristled, undoing - and with some discomfort - that poor button on her jeans and letting soft play-do skin push out into my beanbag or enormity. I repeat, our tummies touched. My tummy, the size of Santa’s sack, brushed against the vixen skin of Maria’s virginal protrusion. Fuck, I’m getting horny just thinking about it.
I was terrified. As usual. Her hands were round my neck now and her teeth were gnashed so tightly that I’m not sure how air got in and out. I was terrified. But in a good way. And she terrified me in the good way for the past three hours. The last words I remember saying were:
“No wonder he was disgusted in you…”

+

And now it is now. And I’m sitting next to her, feeling my blubbery stomach rise up and down as I take deep breaths. Catching breaths that I seemed to have previously misplaced. And, next to me, is her. Maria Echeverria. Breaker of Chains. And her baby tummy is doing the same. Like a small pup trying to imitate its mummy. What the fuck was happening?
“What the fuck is happening?”
She smiled, and ran her talons down my cheek.
“You passed” she said, more enigmatically than Alan Turing cosplaying as The Riddler.
“Cool” I smile. “But what did I pass exactly?”
“My initiation test. To see if you could really be my protegee”
Wait… hang about…
“What?” I turn to look at her, my face now the broken omelette of confusion.
“I wanted to know if you could do it. Destroy someone. Pull off the wings of a butterfly. I wanted to know if you were worth my time. Not just some mimic, but actually, deeply cut from the same cloth. A junior to my senior. I wanted to know if you could Maria me” she said, reaching over and picking up a chicken leg and biting into it.
I still don’t understand.
“I still don’t understand”
“Of course you don’t” she grinned. “I was letting you role-play on me. I… was struggling to get you do a solo mission. You are… well, let’s face it, you’ve completely let yourself go and no sane person would touch you”
“You touch me?”
“Am I sane?” she replied and… touche, Maria. Touche. “So, I let you do it to me. I wanted to see if you would dare. I wanted to see if you could. But, most of all, I wanted to see if you enjoyed it. And you did, Naomee. Because you’re like me. A destroyer of worlds. And it’s so fucking hot. That’s why I love you. Because it’s like looking into a mirror”.
And that sentence is a lot to comprehend in real time.
“You sacrificed your body though?”
“Pffft… I can get it back in weeks. I’m Maria Echeverria, Queen of the Andals. I can lose the 33lbs I’ve gained easy…”
33?!?!?!?!?!?!?
“But why? Why do all that for me?” I said, whimpering with arousal and confusion and fear and happiness.
“So... how to explain? Right, so, there are these toys. They’re called Chinese finger traps. The way they work is they tighten around you the more you try to pull it off. So you pull tighter, so they restrict more, so you pull tighter. Well, that's what I wanted you to do. I wanted you to fight me. I wanted you to rail against me. I wanted you to have to tighten, the more I pulled away. I throw a fucking dumbbell at your head. It was all part of your conditioning. Because that’s where the satisfaction lies. In that tension. In that resistance. And if you were to have any hope of doing the things that I do, you needed to learn how to be a Chinese finger trap”
I sat there, dumbstruck. Struck dumb with dumbness. My mind had never ‘what the fuck?’-ed so hard before. The grey tissue of my brain melted into marshmallow and words vanished from my vocabulary every time I reached for one. And the only words I could actually stop from worming out of my fingers were:
“You love me?”
 

One of the most unique pieces ever, and one of the best to boot!

Yeah, it turns out the real Abyss is the friends we make along the way

Thank you to all those who read, commented or pressed that little heart button that means like. It's been really nice to write a story that people seemed to enjoy, so thanks. You guys reading it made it all worthwhile

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.
 

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.
 

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.
 

Yeah, it turns out the real Abyss is the friends we make along the way

FINALE
Part 14 - Raptors
 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that she does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you"
- Ol’ Freddy Nietszche.
 
 

Close your eyes.
Really, do it. Close your eyes. You’re reading this on your PC or laptop or tablet or phone, aren’t you? And you’re in the sanctity of your own bedroom maybe, or somewhere private. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that you can guarantee nobody else will be. The Emirates during an Arsenal home game, perhaps.
But do it. Close your eyes. Sit back, tilt your head back and close your eyes. Doing it? Good. Wait… how did you read this sentence if your eyes are closed?
For real though, close your eyes and picture this scene. Switch off your music and focus on the sights and sounds of what we’re about to describe. Picture Naomee. Young woman, bright future ahead of her. She’s a charming young woman. Her hair is as blonde as hay. There is a small constellation of freckles dotted on her cheeks and nose that she despised when she was a kid but has grown to accept and even admire as she got older. She has an uncomfortable habit of fidgeting with her hair when self-conscious. A blushed smile and she’d run her hand through her bangs as if her fringe only ever covered her eyes when her cheeks got red. Her name is Naomee, her friends call her Nay-Nay, and she’s the second hottest woman you’ve ever seen.
She works in your office, maybe. Or you see her in the gym. She lives across the road from you or her old best friend at school was your sister. She waited your table when she was at college or bumped her trolley into yours in the supermarket one time. And she looks like every angel you’ve ever imagined. Except, of course, I have read a Bible and know that angels are actually ugly motherfuckers. And also non-binary, which is pretty rad, if you think about it. Enbies represent!
You look at her and this what you see. Beyond her weathergirl smile, with the dimpled cheeks and eyes light blue, like an ocean that had frozen over. You see her and you’re a hot-blooded pervert, you check her out. Your eyes fidget uncomfortably, sneaking glances at her airy build. Light and lithe and skinny with sunshine. Her skin is made of nectar and ambrosia. It dances with elfin tightness, delicate and sweet. She carries herself like her bones are made of bubbles. This is Naomee. This is Naomee one year ago.
And now look at her.
Just look at her. Look at her, on all fours. Tongue hanging out like a dog trapped in a hot car. All mush and flesh and shapeless sloth. Wearing nothing but a bra and underwear that were purchased 12 weeks and 50lbs ago. Everything else hanging out like discarded curtains. A stomach made of butter left out in the sun. Furrows in the stomach where it folded in like origami. Her shoulders permanently Stay Puft.
What the fuck happened to her?
Well, I happened to her. It’s me, by the way. Maria. And, this final chapter, we’re telling it together. Maria and Naomee. As one.
She’s slobbering over a cake. That’s what she’s doing. The cake is some German thing. Not sure of the name. Probably ends in -torte or -kuchen. She’s eating it like it’s bluetooth. Hands-free… it’s a… hands-free joke. Anyway, she’s eating it hands free. Like a pig from a trough. Pushing her head in it, letting the icing splatter over her face, so caked in cake that you’d be forgiven that this is Noel’s House Party. It isn’t Noel’s House Party. This show is not suitable for kids.
And, as she gorges on cake, ripping into it like she’s the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, we better tell you what’s been happening since you were last here. And where better to start than telling you about when the COVID restrictions were over and we could go back to work…

+

Big Rab didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, anyway. That little face of his - the face you imagine Esio Trot pulls when he’s on the point of orgasm - said plenty, but the lips moved not a jot. He stared with his unkempt eyebrows jungling downward, frown lines riven across his face like dehydrated soil. His weird moustache looking bushy and confused.
Of course, Big Rab hadn’t seen Naomee in over a year. I’d not got a camera that worked on my laptop, or so I had told him. I’m sure you remember me telling you all this. It was quite the hoot at the time. I would be sent laptop upon laptop as he tried to ensure that the camera worked. Of course, they all did. But I pretended they didn’t so I could balloon in peace (B.I.P.). And, because of that time delay, he remembered me looking like the dawn chorus. Like Springtime. Like life and birth and rebirth itself. Like that girl we described at the start of this chapter. It had been a long year but I wasn’t that girl any more. Was I?
No, you weren’t, Naomee. No you weren’t. Honestly, you wouldn’t even pass a distant relative of the girl you once were. It would scarcely be believable that your old self would be willing to socialise with your new self. A fat wastrel blob of gelatinous shame, mushed into straining skin like an overfilled binbag. Because I can do ornate metaphors too.
But breaking the chair was a bit much. I was in the cubicle across from you when it happened. I liked to stare at you and then stare at all the people staring at you. I would watch as they flicked between the image of you in their memory bank and your current incarnation, and working out what happened. Fucking hell, scribbled on all their faces. Double-checking, to make sure they weren’t just seeing double. And Big Rab and all the others were looking at you as you leaned back. And the chair broke.
To be fair, you were filling it. Rammed in. Fixed in. Even if it hadn’t broken, you were in trouble with it. It was not designed for you. For this you. Squished inside it. Fat bulging over the armrests. Like a hot mess. Only less hot.
And then it broke. The plastic where the nuts were bolted in ructured. The new fat girl was on her arse in the office and it was so humiliating. And it was so hot.
Big Rab looked up in shock. I remember the expression. Like Mitch McConnell taking a shit. Like a blobfish pressed up against a window pane. Wondering the cause of the ruckus. Wasn’t he?
Yeah. He was.
And he was looking at you, Naomee, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was. Looking somebody carved Voldermort’s face out of a snot bubble. And seeing my fat arse on the carpet while the chair split across the room like they were horcruxes.
“Naomee… a word”
What did he say in that meeting, Nay-Nay?
He… he was worried. About my behaviour. Though I could sense quotation marks around the word ‘behaviour’. Like behaviour was a euphemism for figure. “What have you done to your behaviour, Naomee?” and “You used to have a fantastic behaviour but you’ve really let your personality go”. He didn’t scold. He did the disappointed dad routine. He said I could grab my stuff and I’d be escorted off the premises. If you hadn’t barged in and done your Maria magic, my job was done for.
You’re welcome.
Not really. Because now, every time I walk in there, I see them looking at me as if I’m contagious. I mean, it’s not me that’s contagious of the two of us, but they’d look at me and keep their distance like I was riddled with coronavirus. A cross on my door.
Covid’s Metamorphoses?
I feel like that reference is wasted on me. They giggle and snicker, and they talk to each other under their breath between glances at me. Like their betting on what I’ll break next. My new chair. The desk. The floor. The world. All because you persuaded little Big Rab to keep me on. The only way you know how. Isn’t that right, Maria.
Yes. I pulled every trick in the book. Because I keep all my tricks in a book. I made that man pull faces of joy that are not suitable pre-watershed. I touched nerve endings that had rusted over back when Starburst were called Opal Fruits and Presidents were allowed to take blowjobs from secretaries as long as he didn’t stick it in her woo-woo. The worrying thing though was that I had to work hard. That worried me. That worries me. I never used to have to.

+

Back to the here and now, and we’re nearly halfway through the cake. Maria sitting and watching, paddles and whips in her hand to remind me that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain. It’s easy to remember, but she reminds me anyway. Painfully. Pleasurefully. I muffle the sound of joyous exhalation by diving headfirst back into the gunky sickly cake, going at it like I’m licking the cake out. And, in many ways, I am.
Afterwards, and I can see it in the corner of my eye, will be the shakes. Weight gain shakes, blitzed together with ice cream and regular cream and double cream and anything else ending in cream. Anything else that would make your GP look at you over the rim of their glasses as if to say “should you really be having that?”. And then mushed all together into a drink so thick it’s practically food. And I’ve got all that to come. After this cake.
And Maria’s sitting on a stool and watching. Like an eagle. A falcon. Hovering over her prey. Or like a praying mantis. Ready to bite my head off. I’d be okay with that, if she bit my head off. It’d be kinda hot.
She looks gorgeous, as she peers down at me, probably contemplating ways of disposing of my body should the situation call for it. She looks soft, curvy and deadly. Looking like a cross between a dream and a nightmare. Looking like a cross between Heaven and Hell. Ecstasy and horror. A climax and the petit mort. Satan and God. Good and evil. Well… yummy evil and bad evil, anyway.
And not slim, either. I guess you’re gonna want us to tell you about what happened there too, aren’t you?
Fine. But I’m telling this story. Me. Naomee. I like this story. The story of why Maria hadn’t lost any weight yet.

+

Close your eyes.
Yes, again! For fuck’s sake, why do you always nag so much? Just close your fucking eyes and appreciate the structural parallel of this installment. Close your eyes and picture Maria. Oh, you don’t mind that, do you? Double-standards, really. Call yourselves fat fetishists and here you are just gagging to picture Maria.
Maria Echeverria. Not her real name. But she says it is her real name and she’s boss, so maybe it is. Maria Echeverria has always been tall and skinny. Not effortlessly so, as we recently discovered. No, creating your own mythology takes work. Takes 5:30am starts on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. It takes living off bird seed and allotment-grown detritus. The stuff that makes me feel ill inside. The stuff I used to eat too.
She’s imposing with her height. She’s ekes out every millimetre of it with a straightened spine and model’s neck. Her thin, serpentine legs are a curiosity, they wrap around you and tighten with ferocity but, when standing, they look light and gentle. Her waist drew in slipperily, wiggling in like the bloody veins of a river. Her chest always upright and pronounced, like gravity couldn’t lay a finger on them. She was the stuff dreams are made of. Appearance-wise. Personality-wise, she was the stuff nightmares are made of. The kind of shit that gives Cthulhu nightmares.
That was what she looked like when I first stared at The Abyss. The funny thing about abysses, however, is their propensity to stare back. And when I witnessed her in all her monstrosity, I saw myself become similarly monstrous. And that’s why Maria hasn’t lost weight.
If anything, she’s gained.
No I haven’t.
Yes, you have. And shut up. I’m telling this. She’s still mesmeric. Entrancing. Bewitching. She haunts your eyes, and the burning smell you can smell is that image being scorched onto your brain, to scar deeply and forever. She’s still tall. Like scaffolding or a church. But she’s got considerably more substance, more softness, more decadence. It’s a pear-shaped tendency, as if that somehow justifies it. Maybe that’s how she justifies it to herself. Maybe she’s just curious what I can do. The darkness in my eyes turn her on, because she knows she created it. She’s ruined me, in a way. But she’s ruined me by making me like her. And now I get to do the reverse.
Her legs have swollen, like puffed out cheeks, softening at the touch and starting to mottle at the back. Her hips are wide and generous, for sashaying and swagger more than narrow stools. And a stomach that isn’t flat any more. It curves, nothing as prole as sagging or jutting, but it’s an outward of skin that hands can melt in. Soft, full, malleable and delicious.
You’re welcome.
We came to an agreement. Like we were divorcing parents sorting out who has the kids and when. She gets to wreak Maria havoc on me from Monday to Friday. And I get weekends. And this worked well for her during furlough. And this works well for me now furlough has ended.
She doesn’t mind. Or maybe she does. Maybe she enjoys the fact that she minds. Maybe the frustration turns her on. Her frustration turns me on. Her exercise habits have capitulated into the sea, and this house has a moratorium on healthy food. And she becomes mine. I get to tear into her with my fat fingers and feast on her formerly fallow flesh. All part of the quid pro quo. Maybe one day she’ll break an office chair too.
I have learnt from the best, when it comes to feeding people to the edge of cliffs. I learnt from her. I know exactly which buttons to press. All of them, all at once. Like a fat woman sitting on the TV controls. Which I’ve been known to do from time to time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice. Anyway, I know how hard to press, I know how terrifying, how safe, how electric, how restrained to be. How hot to be. How cold to be.
I know how long to let my touch linger, and when to pull back. I know when to give her what she wants, and when to pull it away from her. I lean into her, and push food into her, any strength she’d built over the years just squashed by my excess. Every Saturday, every Sunday, she’s my ragdoll play thing and I get to rip her to shreds like a rabid dog. Now that’s living for the weekend.
 
+

And this leads us back to the here and now. WIth the two of us. Maria with the paddle, and Naomee with the weight gain jug dribbling down her mouth and onto her swollen stomach, stickier than semen. Maria with her hand between meaty thighs, gasping for air in the way that pleasure elicits. And Naomee, stifling hiccoughs with more of the shake that caused them. But it’s Friday night, and it’s drawing towards 12, that weekend draws near; so soon the roles can reverse and The Abyss can stare back at Maria.

+

And maybe we will stare at you. Yes, you. We’re Fleabagging again. Which sounds rude, I apologise. But you. You’ve been staring at The Abyss an awful long time, I’ve noticed. How many chapters has it been.You gazing deep and dark into the abyss. Don’t you worry it will gaze back?
Because we mentioned Jurassic Park earlier. But the T-Rex isn’t the real star of the show in that movie. It’s the raptors. Funny thing about the raptors, according to the 90’s classic film. His visual acuity isn’t based on movement like the T-Rex. Oh no. Not the Velociraptor. No, you stare at the velociraptor and the velociraptor just stares right back. Remind you of anything? And that’s when the attack comes in. Not from the front, but from the side. From the raptor you didn’t even know was there.
Not from Maria, but from me. It’s Naomee, by the way. And by the end of this story, I’m going to eat you alive.
Whoops, it seems to be the end of the story.
Yum.