swahilimonkfish

That maria ends this stuck in her own fattening trap, steadily losing the looks that got her everything is perfect

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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.
 

Sounds a little bit like this one... 
Don't know if this is the one to which you are referring?
https://www.deviantart.com/y2qwert/art/Not-A-Loser-Too-842865655

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?”
 

Brilliant, with sharp wit and that King-ian sense of off-ness that you managed so well in that Ice Cream story

Dunno why, but this really reminds me of Trainspotting.

Yeah, our road system is improved at the same rate the characters in this will lose weight...which is to say the opposite will happen.
 
Ha, thanks! That's saying something coming from you.
 
And I need to finish that.

Love the blatant - sorry *coincidental* - similarities between real life counterparts. And I love the whole vibe of this story. The sinister underpinning of a story that otherwise seems so believable and true. You could have given this story the Fargo-esque intro of it being based on real events and I'd have bought it. Looking forward to this!

Brilliant, with sharp wit and that King-ian sense of off-ness that you managed so well in that Ice Cream story

Brilliant, with sharp wit and that King-ian sense of off-ness that you managed so well in that Ice Cream story

Who? I've no idea who that is, this character is based on no actual person and any resemblance is purely accidental...
 
What counter parts? surely they don't resemble real people....and thanks, I want it to be escalatingly creepy and sinister.
 
Chapter 2: At the Mountains of Fitness
 
Gaining thirty five pounds out of the blue wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
 
It wasn’t even in the top ten worst things Tessa had experienced. 
 
Number one was the shocking and terrifying diagnosis sixteen months earlier, where the doctor had listened to her headache and blurry vision symptoms and said she was getting a catscan that day. Number two was that she’d need brain surgery and chemo to remove the evil little lump on the back of her brain and make sure it didn’t spread. Those had been nightmares that had left her sobbing in her mother’s lap, afraid not just of dying but of dying an insensate, drained vegetable.
 
Finding out that she’d gotten fat rated under a public break up.
 
Not, Tessa thought as rural California shot by, that she was really fat.
 
A finger tap to the paunch she had confirmed she certainly wasn’t A-list skinny anymore for certain, but she wasn’t fat. Consulting a BMI calculator on her phone proved to Tessa that she was still at a healthy body mass...by .2 percentage points, granted. But compared to how painfully thin she’d been at the end of her treatments, a gaunt ninety nine pounds, she honestly preferred the chub. Then she’d been cold and exhausted all the time, the fifty pounds since hadn’t been noticeable even.
 
“We’re going to need to stop and get gas at the next town,” her driver said, “what do you want for lunch?”
 
This wasn’t the pleasant middle aged man who’d driven her from the air port. No, as soon as Hero Girl’s producers had heard that their famously skinny star wasn’t so skinny anymore, Tessa had been whisked into another luxury car driven by a higher ranking staffer and rocketed towards northern California at top speed, as if her fat would fall off if they went fast enough. This staffer was a blonde woman in her mid twenties named Isabeau: California tan, model tall and pilates sculpted thin, her clavicle visible at the top of her professional blouse. That made her both younger than Tessa and noticeably thinner.
 
“I suppose I should eat something,” Tessa admitted, “I haven’t had a meal since I took off from London yesterday night…”
 
It did not escape the actress how Isabeau had stated the question. Not “Do you want something for lunch?” but “What do you want for lunch?” with an unstated “fatty” at the end. Tessa was used to being judged, she was a celebrity after all, but now for the first time in her adult life she was being treated as something less than the beautiful elite. Not the worst thing in the world, chubby or not Tessa knew she remained one of the most privileged people in the world, but still striking.
 
“How about one of those gigantic American burgers, a large order of fries, a cherry shake and a soda?” Tessa told her with a light tone, “maybe with a pizza for desert?”
 
Her driver’s sunglass obscured eyes stared at her in the rear view mirror.
 
“I”m joking, really. How about a small salad that won’t give me the runs?” the actress sighed instead.
 
Tessa leaned back in her seat as the car pulled off the interstate, her hand going naturally to her stomach. The car hit a bump in one of America’s marvelously maintained roads, letting the British woman feel a jiggle run through her body. Her hand felt like it was on jello and beneath her jacket she felt her shirt ride up at the vibration, seat belt cutting into her stomach. Braless breasts wobbled at the shoulder strap dividing them, while her thighs smacked into each other. Her underwear rode up her ass, which had gone from surprisingly large for her size tight booty to fun house bouncy. Even her more cherubic cheeks jiggled.
 
Perhaps the weight wasn’t so hard to notice after all.
 
Come to think of it, Tessa could feel every ounce. Her upper arms were sore from where her shirt pinched into them and she could feel her breasts touching her chest where they’d begun to sag. She was warm too, California was always warm but the hoodie felt like a parka thanks to the new insulation. She pulled off the concealing garment, having to tug her shirt down again as it refused to cooperate and slid right back up. The actress wasn’t a drinker, but looking down (feeling her chin double) she had a beer belly anyway. A pale bulge with two red rings on the top and bottom of her muffin top, one left by her too tight shirt and the other by her soft grey sweat pants. 
 
She’d practically been living in them since her diagnosis, they kept her warm and comfortable, but now they’d betrayed her. Becoming too warm and too tight, showing off the thickened state of her legs. She undid the draw string, feeling some relief and wondering how she hadn’t felt the pinch earlier. It was a good thing she hadn’t worn Yoga pants or else her ass would have been...
 
Hadn’t she worn yoga pants…
 
“Here you go,” Isabeau said, handing her a surprisingly heavy paper bag.
 
The car was pulling out of a drive through and back to the interstate. Had she been considering her fat through getting gas and ordering food?
 
“Um, thanks have you already taken yours out?” Tessa asked, realizing she must be more tired than she thought.
 
“No, I never eat from there. That place is a carb factory and I’m on a diet,” her driver said, “I”m surprised you insisted on going there given our destination.”
 
It had been a full day since the actress had slept, but she didn’t remember asking for anything beyond a salad. Opening the bag proved she had one, albeit one with enough blue cheese to qualify as a dairy product. With it was a container of broccoli cheddar soup, a bread bowl the size of her face and as a side, more bread. 
 
Very much not the meal a woman with thirty five million dollars riding on her getting back in shape would order.
 
“I didn’t…,” she started saying, as she remembered ordering it off the menu over the grumble of her stomach as Isabeau’s eyebrow rose in disgust, “...thanks.”
 
Tessa knew wasting food in a world where so many went hungry was wrong. But she resolved to only eat the salad and just the green parts of it too, leaving the dressing on the side. Feeling another wave of exhaustion hit her, Tessa began eating lettuce…
 
                    ….
“We’re almost there,” her driver’s voice came, “you should probably wake up.”
 
The actress’ eyes fluttered and she pulled herself out of sleep, finding her forehead rested against the window. Any attempt to fall back asleep was ruined as the car pulled from a paved rural road onto a long, cobbled drive. More uncomfortable jiggles shot through the plumped starlets body as the car passed along the long driveway, meticulously tended forests of thin trunked trees with strange, orange fruits hanging from them.
 
 Post rest fogginess surrounded her, she’d never been able to sleep on a plane or in a car and was surprised she’d managed during the drive. Wiping sleep from her eyes, she tried to dispel the mental fugue, difficult given how warm and tired she felt. She stretched, back popping and her belly plopping over the waistband of her sweat pants. Feeling a little shock of embarrassment, Tessa picked her jacket off the seat next to her.
 
A paper bag from a place calling itself “Panera Bread” rested on top of it, falling off and showing it held only an empty soup container, salad bowl and used napkins.
 
“I didn’t...Isabeau, how long was I out?” the actress asked, “I’d planned on doing some reading…”
 
“You fell asleep right after you ate,” her peroxide blonde driver answered, smug condescension dripping off of her words.
 
Tessa wanted to say that she’d only eaten the salad and not even the dressing. But the bag was empty of food and she felt...full. Pleasantly full, like a hole in her being had been filled in. And a cautious lick at the corner of her lips returned the taste of blue cheese and soup…
 
“Well, I was tired from the flight,” she said, to herself as much as to her smugly thin driver.
 
They drove for at least thirty minutes through the well tended forest, only once seeing a small group of workmen who ignored the car. Tessa noted they were going steadily upwards and marveled at the sheer size of this place. The studio had said the resort was very exclusive and private, but the property taxes on this place alone must be gigantic…
 
At last they pulled out of the forest, pulling into an immense circle drive and their destination. A huge garden stretched to the left, exotic plants and green houses soaring upwards, a massive hedgemaze brooded on the left. In the far distance, massive snow capped peaks brooded, dark clouds over them. As the car came to a halt, Tessa glimpsed a large stone horse barn on the other side of the large garden and on a rise about two miles away, was of all things, a castle tower. She’d been in enough fake ones during her early career to recognize it as a reproduction of a late medieval drum keep, unfinished and abandoned walls hanging from it.
 
However, the actual spa took up most of her attention.
 
When told that there was an exclusive weight loss center available, Tessa had expected something ultra modern and high tech in Beverly Hills. When told it was in the northern part of the state, she’d expected something rustic and rural themed. Instead, she’d been brought to a red stone mansion worthy of a Roman Emperor’s pleasure villa. Columns and balconies soared for four stories to a roof of gold colored ceramic tiles and it sprawled over several acres, the size of a small cathedral. Over a set of green double doors was a circular stained glass window, depicting a topless blonde woman half wearing a Toga and surrounded by a sunburst. A primped, smartly dressed woman waited beneath it, next to a toned girl in spandex.
 
“I’ll get your bags,” Isabeau said, stepping smartly out of the car.
 
Tessa picked up her jacket and backpack, stepping out to an early spring chill. She slid her jacket, one of her favorite black pleather ones, over her shoulders and went to zip it up. The jacket was made to be figure hugging for a girl who weighed one hundred and fourteen pounds on a fat day. For one hundred forty nine pound tessa, her paunch, a little swollen from over eating, had to be sucked in to zip it up. When released, her belly bulged against it.
 
“I knew I should have worn a hoodie,” Tessa thought, embarrassment coloring her cheeks, “Its lucky no one recognized me in this…”
 
She realized that she had worn a hoodie at the studio but must have left it behind in shock at finding out she was chubby. Her doctor’s had tested her thoroughly for memory loss, motor control issues and any other neurologic issues after her surgery and found nothing, but had warned her that fogginess might last a while after the chemo. That and jet lag was surely the reason she felt so strange…
 
“Miss Holmes, I presume?” the smartly dressed woman said in a breathy voice, stepping down the stairs to the click of heels with an extended hand, “Welcome to the lodge, I’m Dr. Mortenson.”
 
Tessa was used to beautiful women, she worked in Hollywood after all, a place where perfect faces and figures could be bought and was considered one of the most attractive celebrities in the world. But Mortenson was breathtakingly gorgeous: dark brown hair was pulled tight into a severe bun that only made her heart shaped face stand out more, just as her black glasses made her blue eyes shine. Her lips were too plump to be anything but fake and too soft to be anything but natural. She was dressed in a black skirt, white blouse and black blazer, all very professional but also very figure hugging. And her figure was...ridiculous, her waist was thin as Tessa’ had ever been, flat as a board and narrow as a wasp’s. Her hips on the other hand were va-voom round, a tantalizing bulge that would fit into a rap video, while what had to be DD cup breasts bulged marvelously beneath her narrow shoulders. A gold necklace with fat black opals rested on the tops of her breast, contrasting with her gently tan skin.
 
“Yes, its good to meet you. This place is a bit more than I imagined,” Tessa responded, trying not to stare, “when they said it was a lodge I was thinking of a big house, not…”
 
“Oh yes, the original builder had it designated as a fraternal lodge to avoid taxes. We have to keep it in the name according to the law, I believe the name “Black Mountain Lodge” adds distinction,” Mortenson smiled, “and clients prefer it. After all, would you rather go to a fat camp or to a lodge?”
 
The actress had to smile, “Well, as I told my mother I’d be at a lodge for a while...certainly the lodge.”
 
Dr. Mortensen laughed softly. Tessa guessed she was in her early thirties, although it was hard to tell. She was young looking and gorgeous, Tessa knew how that could make you look younger.
 
“Exactly, well, this is Sarah,” the doctor said, gesturing at the very fit woman next to her, a tan brunette who’s abs could be used as cheese graters, “she’s going to be your personal trainer for our exercise sessions. She’ll take your bag.”
 
“It’s nice to meet you, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other,” the fit trainer smiled, coldly, judging Tessa like a piece of meat, “I’ll take your bags up to your room.”
 
“Oh, I can carry them, better get started on the exercise...” Tessa began to say, only to hear the car start up.
 
Isabeau was already driving away, without a word to her. Sarah picked up her bags despite Tessa’s claim.
 
“Oh, don’t worry. You and I need to get started on orientation anyway,” Mortenson told her, showing another dazzling smile, “follow me please, bring your personal bag.”
 
Tessa followed the doctor up the stairs and into the mansion, the personal trainer holding the door for them. Inside was a vast central room with marble pillars rising up towards the dark roof, a smouldering fire place provided warmth while a vast candelabra made out of elk antlers provided light. Old oil paintings of women exercising were on the walls, as befitted 18th century norms most were scenes from mythology where rather fleshy nymphs and goddesses were pursued by rapacious satyrs. Tessa had loved art history but didn’t have time to stare, Mortenson set a very fast pace despite her high heels. The Doctor’s round hips twitched like church bells at the crowning of a King, straining her skirt’s seams even before she started going up a broad set of stairs. Despite the press of her butt, Mortenson seemed immensely fit, going fast despite very high heels. Tessa had to hurry to keep up with her, for the first time feeling her weight.
 
“Currently we only have two other guests that are currently in the exercise room. Unfortunately our orientation will take up the entire afternoon session,” the doctor told her, “I know that you are in a hurry to lose weight but we will catch you up after dinner.”
 
“Glad to hear, I’m still feeling groggy from the flight and then the drive,” Tessa said, not mentioning the unexpectedly heavy meal she’d gorged on, “I’ve never been one to exercise a lot but doing it when I’m so tired wouldn’t endear me to it…”
 
The breadbowl was weighing in her belly, just like her thighs were burning from hurrying up the stairs. She might not be officially overweight, but Tessa was feeling out of shape for the first time.
 
“Yes, I’m sure,” Mortenson said, a verbal sneer, “but this is a holistic weight loss facility. By the time we’re done, you’ll have a very altered view of exercise. Follow me please.”
 
The doctor’s office was, in contrast to the archaic lodge, ultra modern. Ergonomic chairs were on each side of a sleek desk, with a brand new Mac on the clean surface. Two pads of papers and fountain pens were the only other things on the desk, while book shelves groaning with heavy tomes surrounded them. Mortenson sat behind the desk, Tessa for the first time realizing that the Doctor was actually very short, only her stilettos letting her reach Tessa’s not exactly towering height.
 
“Please, have a seat. There’s a good deal of paper work before we get measuring you,” Mortenson said, sliding one clip board towards Tessa, “and I need to conduct a psychological audit.”
 
“Of course, I’m glad that this seems very thorough,” the actress said, taking the paper as the Doctor’s red painted nails began clicking on the computer.
 
For a moment there was silence, letting Tessa read and check boxes. The Lodge’s contract wasn’t much different from a film one, although the language was less legalese. However, there were some odd things she had to agree too…
 
“I understand the pledge to secrecy, I’d certainly never heard of this place but how do you get clients if no one knows?” Tessa asked.
 
“Oh, we have agreements with studios, recording labels and modeling agencies,” the voluptuous doctor explained, “when one of their talents has...a weight issue, we are contacted. Its a well kept secret, we take clients only be recommendation. Very similar to the fraternal lodge we were founded as.”
 
“What about repeat clients?” the actress pressed, “say someone has a relapse…”
 
“Let me let you in on a secret, none of our patients relapse,” Mortenson smiled, “Not in my time as Head of Operations. Nor for my predecessors.”
 
“None? What about...I don’t know, women who have a baby after wards…,” Tessa asked, seeing the Doctor chuckle.
 
“I told you, this is a holistic facility. After your time here, you’ll never struggle losing weight again,” Mortenson told her.
 
Somewhat satisfied, if not fully believing the claim, Tessa went back to her paperwork. Everything was fairly standard, excusing them for any unavoidable accidents and promising not to speak of the program but…
 
“You need to search my bags and give up my electronics?” the actress asked, looking up from the second to last page.
 
“That always raises eyebrows. But we believe in absolute privacy here. Our clients have reputations as some of the most beautiful women in the world,” Mortenson told her, “and while they are here, well they are very much not. Think of what would happen to a model’s career if a photo of her weighing 250lbs and struggling to use an exercise bike was leaked? Which is why we must insist you hand over any phones and computers, they’ll be bagged and kept in a locked safe. If you need to print something from them, you can do so under supervision during your free hour. Otherwise, this is the only computer onsite, we believe that moderns screens are behind many health issues.”
 
“Well...I suppose I wouldn’t want tabloids to have photos of me like this,” Tessa admitted, adjusting the pinch of her sweat pants, a thick sliver of pale fat leaking out under her jacket, “but the bag search…is that necessary?”
 
Mortenson sighed, smiling sadly.
 
“Our guests, are to be blunt...fat. And the fat, left to their own devices, will only get fatter. They’re here because they’ve developed bad habits, or more likely, always had bad habits that waning youth has allowed the consequences of which to come due. And despite the money paid on their behalf and the careers riding on their recovery, far too many try to self sabotage and smuggle in snacks,” the doctor informed her, “Being held to discipline is difficult for them. I’ve had top models try and smuggle in twenty pounds of candy underneath clothes, actresses with superhero roles on the line hide nutella jars in their pockets and once, a member of a royal family, I won’t say which nation, hide sixty chocolate bars in a false bottom of a bag.”
 
“I can promise you that I don’t have any candy in my bag,” Tessa told her, trying to put some humor in it, “all I want is for this...gut to go back to normal.”
 
“Most of our clients say that...and over 90% have cheat day snacks in their bags. In that case, we have to impound their bags and issue wardrobes from stocks. You’ve a reputation as being more than a pretty face and I trust you Tessa, but that tummy, that tummy I do not trust. All it wants is to get bigger and it’ll lie through your mouth just to keep growing,” the doctor said, taking the freshly signed paper work from the actress and leafing through it.
 
Mortenson’s precisely plucked eyebrow arched at the last page.
 
“A cancer survivor?” the doctor said, “I had no idea, you poor thing…”
 
Tessa swallowed, “Its gone, gone for four months. I was lucky to have caught it early. I don’t have another check in for several months at least.”
 
“Well, that speaks well to your toughness then. And your luck. I know its odd to think of a diagnosis as lucky, but it is, in my experience, inevitable that we will have health problems. If we catch them early, then we are lucky,” the doctor explained, “take your weight. You are at the moment at a near average weight if I could guess. Not Hollywood thin but not too much higher than the average weight of a modern woman. We’ve caught you early, before your body can get too used to being fat.”
 
A blush crept up Tessa’s cheeks, “Well, it does feel startlingly new to me. Its like it just appeared on me…”
 
“Its often like that for our clients. I call it an “Awakening Moment”, when the weight makes itself known,” Mortenson told her, standing up with grace and smoothing her skirts, “now, our next step will be to get you weighed and to determine your necessary diet. Follow me please…”
Tessa got up less gracefully, her weight and tiredness weighing on her. She followed the doctor down another hallway, to a room with an angled chair and a built in writing desk, like a luxurious auditorium chair. It had a roll of paper that Mortenson rolled down across it, like a table in an exam room. It was all lit bubblegum pink and felt warm and inviting, hidden speakers in the walls laying silent.
 
“Now, your next step is to write out everything you’ve eaten in the last month,” the doctor informed her, setting a sheaf of paper and another expensive pen onto the desk, “while this chair weighs and measures you.”
 
“I was weighed and measured this morning,” Tessa tried to say.
 
“This device is more accurate,” the doctor insisted, “And before you say that remembering everything is impossible, don’t worry. As soon as I leave, I’m going to play an ASMR recording through the speakers that will put you in a state of mind that will let you recall everything with ease.”
 
Only able to blink, Tessa nodded. This was a lot, but well...she did want to lose weight…
 
“Oh, one more thing. You’ll need to strip down to underwear for this to work properly,” Mortenson informed her, “after I leave of course.”
 
The doctor left, hips swinging and heels clicking. Flummoxed, Tessa let out a breath, realizing she’d been sucking in her stomach the entire time. She peeled the skin tight shirt and athleisure sweats off of her body, feeling cold and ...exposed in just socks and underwear. Sitting onto the chair, she felt mechanisms under the padding click and shift, like one of those novelty toys made of pins on a grid that let you put impressions into it. Taking up the pen, she tried to recall her recent diet. For a moment there was nothing, until faint, strange whispers came over the speakers. It was Mortenson’s soft, breathily seductive voice but she couldn’t make out the words....
 
“Let’s see, a bread bowl with broccoli cheddar soup, large salad with extra blue cheese crumbles and dressing, three bags of pretzels and two sodas on the plane, a vegetarian wrap, a bagel and smoothie at the airport…,” Tessa listed off, surprised at how much she’d eaten, recalling more and more food as the whispers came, “three bananas at home…”
 
She woke up with a start to a knock on the door, having again fallen asleep. The whispers were gone and she was on the bed, wearing only her underwear and...chubby. Plump breasted and big bellied, a chunky girl who’s youthful litheness had softened up. She poked her stomach, which no longer felt swollen but instead soft as half melted ice cream. The knock came again, with the doctor’s voice.
 
“Miss Holmes? Are you ready to return to my office?” the doctor asked.
 
“One moment, sorry I drifted off..,” Tessa told her.
 
Getting dressed was harder than taking her clothes off. Her thighs pressed at the fabric of the sweats, and her shirt was a torture device. She was glad that she’d left her pleather jacket at the studio and brought her hoodie with her, it…
 
“Please hurry, we’re on a schedule,” Mortenson told her.
 
“Yes, of course,” Tessa said, tying her shoes, belly folding over as she did, and opening the door.
 
Mortenson’s face bore a faint tinge of disappointment on it when the door opened. She held a clip board against one shapely hip and took the sheaf of paper from the desk, which was full of writing.
 
“Follow me please, we’ve a few things to discuss,” the doctor said.
 
Another walk following those swinging hips brought them down a hallway and into a room. It was something out of a five star hotel: a large bed, its own bath tub and closet, a divan and wardrobe and chest. More paintings of plump goddesses being forced into unfamiliar exercise were on the wall. There a plump Athena leapt into battle, her plump arms ill suited to the spear and shield they held and her tummy fat peeking out under a bronze muscle breastplate, soft legs poised to deliver a spear blow on a massively muscled giantess. The war goddess' grey eyes had a look of determination...as well as some embarrassment, while the giantess' gaze held nothing but fear. Across from her on the other wall, a flabby Aphrodite nervously drank wine standing before a mirror while maids prepared to dress her. One unhelpful maid pointing out a thick cankle on the love goddess’ lazy leg while another hid a laugh as she brought a dress for a much smaller Olympian. The strawberry blonde sex goddess had a worried look on her face as she guzzled wine, her free hand gripping a rather matron roll of fat across her belly.
 
 
“This is where you’ll be staying with us, there is no key to give you as there is no lock,” the doctor said, “There is a jacket in the wardrobe, we’ve stocked the dresser with seven sets of size ten leggings, with matching shirts. We took the liberty of placing your socks and underwear as well.”
 
That made Tessa turn from examining the chubby Olympians, “Why did you stock my dresser? I had my own clothes…”
 
Disappointment crossed Mortenson’s heart shaped face, her plump lips pursing into a frown.
 
“Miss Holmes, we talked about this. If there is contraband in your bag, it is impounded,” the curvaceous doctor insisted, “and you had nine pounds of jelly beans and five bags of potato chips in your suitcase. It was a wonder you could close it.”
 
“I...I didn’t…,” Tessa said, confusion giving way to anger, “I...I didn’t even know I was coming here when I packed that  bag! Why would I load up with junk when I was going to play a superhero? Give me back my bag now and I won’t consider suing you!”
 
Mortenson contrived to look down at her, while being her height only due to heels. Her manicured fingers tapped the shining black gem on her chest, its light flicking across Tessa’s eyes as the full chested physician inhaled.
 
“Miss Holmes, my staff wear go pros when opening bags to avert this sort of thing. I understand you are angry at being caught out but know I am not angry or disappointed, you are far from the first actress who’s bad habits were caught out,” the doctor explained evenly, “You probably only remember putting a light snack for emergencies in there and not the junk food buffet you packed, as I said your fat can’t be trusted. Fat makes giant portions seem reasonable, a sedentary life seem healthy and tightening clothes a result of the wash. Admitting you are fat is one of the first steps to recovery.”
 
Throughout the explanation, anger had faded from Tessa’s mind. Replaced with the shameful feeling of her hand caught in the cookie jar. Surely she didn’t pack a bunch of sugary junk...had she? Yes her appetite had increased after she’d stopped chemo and before that she’d had a bit of a sweet tooth...
 
Mortenson handed over a print out of numbers and measurements that made Tessa’s eyes bulge. If it was to be believed, she’d added nine inches to her waist and six to her hips, as well as three cup sizes. And her weight…
 
“One hundred and fifty three pounds…,” Tessa exclaimed, a pit forming in her stomach, “but...I was only one hundred and forty nine?”
 
“Our scale is the most accurate in the world,” the beautiful physician explained, reading the list of food Tessa had written,  “if it says you weigh one hundred and fifty three pounds, you weigh it. And you are sadly, already in the overweight category. Your muscle tone is quite poor as well, I understand the sapping effects of chemo but it’ll make our work harder.”
 
Stunned out of anger and into confusion, disbelief and terror, Tessa rubbed her eyes, “I...alright, sure. But I didn’t put anything in my bag, maybe...I don’t know maybe my driver…”
 
“Played a prank? Or were you holding it for her? Either way, its quite in line with your diet,’ the blue eyed doctor said, “this list you wrote is nothing but take out and junk. If you weren’t a vegetarian your blood pressure would already be elevated. This is just my professional opinion, a diagnosis can come later, but you appear to be a lifelong over eater whose humming bird metabolism covered it up. Chemotherapy can lower the metabolism for life, combined with nearing thirty it appears that your bad habits have caught up with you.”
 
She made a tut tut sound and tapped the protruding bulge of Tessa’s tummy, finger sinking into the soft skin.
 
“Well, we will fix that, starting tonight. I will give you a moment to freshen up and shower. In thirty minutes, your trainer will come to escort you to dinner. There is a swimsuit in one of your drawers, this evening is a water exercise,” the doctor told her.
 
Mortenson left the room with a sashay of hips, leaving Tessa alone with herself. Shivering, the actress put the paper on the bed and entered the luxurious bathroom. A hot shower relieved some stress...and added some, for her body was soft to the touch. Tessa found fat on her hips and belly, fat under her chin and on her back, fat on her knees and on her triceps. It felt strange and alien, an invader from somewhere else. Looking down broke the uncanny valley, seeing a body that was almost hers but not.
 
Getting out and toweling off, she opened the drawer the doctor had indicated, finding a black bikini. It was small and skimpy, it was going to show off the weight she’d gained like nothing else. Not that she had much choice.
 
“One month, one month and I’ll be back to normal,” Tessa said to herself, plopping onto the bed to get dressed.
 
The impact of her weight made the paper with her humiliating vitals slide under the headboard and fall behind the bed. Sighing, the actress got her snug bikini panties on, softened and lowered cheeks hanging out the sides and plush love handles hanging over the band, and slid the heavy bed away from the wall, not wanting to get caught under the bed or worse, break her bikini or even worse, bang her head. The wobble of her new breasts was new and unfamiliar, Tessa was used to being a near b cup but the DDs she had were less pleasant than she’d expected. Mostly they were just heavy.
 
The bed slid back with difficulty on the soft carpet, testament to its sturdy construction and Tessa’s weakened muscles. She’d followed instructions to take it easy with exercise but apparently had taken that far too far. But eventually she was able to pick the damning paper up, rolls forming as she did.
 
“I guess I am overweight,” the actress sighed to herself, pinching her stomach with a free hand and carefully standing, only to freeze in mid motion, “what...who would…”
 
Carved into the back of the headboard with slow, careful motions, were four words:
 
“RUN WHILE YOU CAN”

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?”
 

Love the blatant - sorry *coincidental* - similarities between real life counterparts. And I love the whole vibe of this story. The sinister underpinning of a story that otherwise seems so believable and true. You could have given this story the Fargo-esque intro of it being based on real events and I'd have bought it. Looking forward to this!

This is a 9 chapter + epilogue story that is entirely @flyer33 fault for suggesting it.
Starring characters that are in no way resembling real people.
The Calling
 
Chapter 1: The Shadow Over Hero Girl
 
Productions can be cursed.
 
Not just in the “Don’t Say the Word MacBeth” way anyone who’s watched a cartoon could tell you, either. Some films are such complete and total disasters behind the scenes that cast and crew ignore primadonna directors and temperamental stars and wonky effects to point directly at the supernatural. Most of these are, of course, false.
 
When Heaven’s Gate spiralled out of control to the point its box office bombing sank the studio and the western genre, set members claimed the auteur director had made a deal with the devil that was coming due. Really, it had more to do with said director insisting the entire crew wait three hours to film a scene for clouds to move the right way and how he was scamming the studio by buying up the remote land he filmed on.
 
When The Conqueror bombed at the box office and then every member of the cast and crew got cancer and died over the next twenty years, the superstitious claimed it was either the result of Producer Howard Hughes scamming a Native tribe for their land or an actual curse laid down by Genghis Khan. Of course, casting John Wayne as a Mongolian had every thing to do with the box office gross. And filming down wind of a nuclear test sight probably had more to do with the cancer than any curse.
 
But very rarely, the superstitious naysayers are entirely right.
 
Hero Girl was one of those rare occasions. It was and is and never will be, an action film based on a comic book character invented to keep merchandising rights in the 50s, retooled to try and exploit the feminism surge of the early 70s and retooled again into brainless cheese cake in the 80s and 90s. It has never been made and never will be made and it will always be being made, taking starlet after starlet down with it.
 
Like radioactive desert soil, Hero Girl had lurked unseen and poisonous under the surface of Hollywood for over decades.
 
In the 60s, Hero Girl was chosen to be the banner film for a blonde bomshell starlet, Lillian Lincoln. A famous beauty who’d romanced hall of fame ball players and presidents, Lincoln was on top of the world when the film was announced. How the super human action would have been shown via 60s effects was a mystery that was never answered. A broken condom for Lillian led to pregnancy related weight gain as she abandoned years of dieting, the actress famous curves went from an hour glass 36-20-36, to a soft and saggy 36-28-42, an unacceptable amount during Hollywood’s strict golden age. Having lost her looks and with them her patron’s attention, the bottom heavy Lillian slipped into immediate obscurity, believed to have died during a car crash on the way to a fat farm.
 
Hero Girl went dormant, seemingly, for years. Over the next twenty years, a few starlet of the months from various Bond films or horror movies expressed interest. Not even the omni present cocaine of the 70s was enough for them to keep their figures but no one linked the sudden poundage to the forgotten film.
 
After the success of the Superman and Batman films in the 80s, Hero Girl woke up and started fattening. The role was offered to the sole actress in Star Wars during ROTJ filming, the day before the metal bikini scenes. The steel bra had to be duct taped on and the rest of her costumes for the film had to be increasingly loosened to deal with the expanding actress, who never took another major role.
 
 When the part was offered to a house hold name supermodel Lindsay Lawford, she refused due to having a solid calendar of photo shoots already booked. Just being approached was enough, when she did a Pepsi shoot, it proved Lindsay had a genetic addiction to the sweetened corn syrup.  Six months of six liters a day ruined her cover girl smile and made her centerfold body a cellulite coated, diabetic blob.
 
Just before Batman and Robin seemingly doomed the superhero genre, Hero Girl struck again. The actress playing Batgirl, a gorgeous and athletic California blonde who’s acting talent was concentrated in her looks, was asked to read for Hero Girl ‘s latest test script a month before Batman’s shooting began. She arrived on set with a gut six inches too big around for her expensive costume, needing two refittings during production despite a personal trainer and a ban from craft services, to the tabloid’s delight. Between the Batman film being godawful and her good looks having turned into tabloid fodder, her promising career sank into obscurity and Hero Girl slipped away as studios abandoned superhero films.
 
...Or so it seemed.
 
In the early 2000s, after X-Men had revived the genre, production on Hero Girl began again. To the misery of a handful of the character’s fans, the actress cast wasn’t a blue eyed blonde like the entirely fictional space alien protagonist, but an absolutely gorgeous African American actress Helena Fruit with a new Oscar and a smoking hot career to go with her stunning good looks. Unfortunately, a knee injury during training put Helena on the couch and she massively over indulged during six months recovery. By the end of the delay, Hero Girl would have needed another six months for its lead to lose the door jamming caboose she’d grown and she was replaced with a ginger Disney starlet, Tracey Truman, looking to move away from her goody too shoes image and embrace the smoking hot looks nature had given her.
 
Unfortunately for Truman, the film’s curse made the weight from her partying pile up across her previously flat midriff. On the day for costume fitting, she stumbled in three hours late, still ** and fifty pounds over weight, most of it concentrated in a record winning beer belly that audibly sloshed. Her drunken tirade at the costumer didn’t ease the director’s nerves, nor did vomiting on him and passing out.
 
Truman was replaced with the new flavor of the month, a brunette named Morgan Wolf who’d wowed in short shorts in a terrible sci fi action movie based on a toyline. Against all odds, Wolf made it through pre-production and even costume fitting...until a writer’s strike put filming on hold for six months. By the end of it, Wolf was so immensely pregnant with triplets that no amount of CGI could hide it and she was paid off a handsome severance sum, which helped as she was never going to fit into those shorts again without help.
 
By this point it was 2010 and the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had executives hungry. Hero Girl’s curse feasted well, even as the movie went nowhere and every actress approached saw their career’s nosedive and their weight’s sky rocket. Everyone established in the film world had heard to stay away from the film, but there were plenty of undiscovered starlets with big eyes and tiny waists for it to pork up. By late 2018 it had devastated a whole crop of Sports Illustrated rookie of the Years trying to get into acting and the studio execs seemed desperate to find someone, anyone to play the part to get the movie started.
 
They supposedly offered $30 million dollars to Evelyn Stone, a famously skinny british actress who’d rose to fame in schlocky pirate movies and then proved her acting chops in period dramas, the role. Some would have thought Stone was picked because she was known for being near anorexically thin. Others because she signed the contract while giving birth and was thus unlikely to get hit with surprise pregnancy weight like so many predecessors. With the contract came a stint in an elite, private weight loss clinic to help Stone lose the minimal amount of baby weight she’d gained, surely in record time.
 
In early 2019, the studio signed another Brit, Tessa Holmes for Hero Girl.
 
….
 
Tessa rubbed the back of her head as the car pulled through LA’s horrible traffic.
 
It was a nervous habit and a bad one, even though her hair hid the surgery scar she’d didn’t want to aggravate it or the titanium plate beneath it. She made herself stop scratching, examining manicured nails instead and taking another sip of her Starbucks’ espresso. Tessa hated Starbucks, especially drinks like this, but the doctor said she needed the extra calories to keep her weight up, even after the last round of chemo and the cancer free diagnosis.
 
“All right back there?” her driver asked, a suited man clean and slick as a new whistle.
 
“Completely fine, just a bit jet lagged,” she replied, “really it would be easier if they didn’t film everything in LA.”
 
She tried to make herself read the script, which was...ridiculous schlock parading as something worthwhile. Hero Girl was little more than masturbation fodder being made into a popcorn flick pretending to have a point about empowerment by a morally bankrupt studio run by monsters who’d have made Nazi propaganda if there was a profit to it, but Tessa was being offered $35 million for her time and contracts for sequels and spin offs worth three times that. It wasn’t like she really needed the money, she could have done nothing her whole adult life and lived comfortably, but she’d been out of the game for over a year thanks to the diagnosis she’d kept thankfully hidden. Starlets tended to wane around thirty if you didn’t get a big franchise, a horrifically sexist tendency but one the 29 year old Tessa was facing despite knowing how sexist it was. That was a lot of money, enough to fund a lot of the charity’s and causes she actually cared about.
 
“Ha, ain’t that the truth,” the driver said over her inner monologue, putting on a turn signal, “say, this is...an odd question but…”
 
Tessa inhaled, wondering what it would be. She’d been asked for autographs since she was a teenager and for creepy autographs not long after that. Being daintily attractive, with a washboard waistline, delicately shapely legs and a provocatively taut butt had kept her rich and successful, but also drawn an insufferable amount of fetishistic energy. She could only pray the driver wasn’t going to ask her to sign feet pics…
 
“My daughter is obsessed with those magic movies you were in and is a big fan of that UN speech you gave, you wouldn’t mind signing an autograph would you? I’ve got a note pad in the glove box if its not too much trouble,” the driver asked kindly.
 
The actress felt herself smile, “Of course, always happy too.”
 
They arrived just after she signed the note and took a selfie, feeling self conscious about her hair length. She’d had short hair for years, but the little pixie cut she’d managed to grow out was positively boyish. Her hair was coming back quickly at least and she didn’t need a wig going out anymore, but it still made her feel bad.
 
Granted, not as bad as being told she had cancer had made her feel, so things were looking up.
 
Stepping out into the studio backlot, Tessa was instantly anonymous. Clad in yoga pants and a hoody, too warm for LA, she could have been any slightly built woman between 15 and 30. It was the nice thing about being short for an actress and being known as a fashionista. If she didn’t wear an ethically sourced gown or pants suit, then she looked like anyone.
 
Honestly Tessa preferred it that way.
 
Stepping up to the costuming department, she was pointed at the right office without being recognized. Tessa to the door and knocked politely, noticing she was rubbing the back of her head again. Her head was having some phantom pains again, memories of the surgery that weren’t real, and it had made her sleep like shit the night before, with weird dreams in the little sleep she’d had.
 
“Yes?” a woman asked as the door opened, smiling to recognize her, “ah, Tessa, so good to see you again.”
 
“Ah, Beth?” Tessa asked, walking in with a smile to a large room packed with sewing machines, measuring tapes and costume wracks stretching back a hundred feet, “right, Beth? Its good to work with you again, you made the Moses set bearable.”
 
Beth was a late middle aged woman, going grey and looking like a well kept librarian. Pencil thin and huge eyed, she reminded Tessa of a very friendly preying mantis. She’d met her on the set of what was probably the last profitable Biblical epic, where she played the wife of the Hebrew Prophet in a highly inaccurate belly baring harem girl outfit. Tessa, barely 20 then, had been a little nervous to be so exposed, and Beth had been instrumental in making her feel comfortable.
 
“Ah yes, well its my business to make the star’s comfortable. Hopefully one day I’ll get to dress you in something that isn’t ridiculous,” Beth smiled as Tessa walked past to set her purse on a small sofa, “this costume is almost as bad as that dancing girl get up and for some reason the writers insisted that your civilian alter ego be dressed frumpy and dumpy. At least I talked them out of the fat suit your character has to wear before getting powers from a glowing rock, ugh. You could tell this was written by a man from a mile off. Can I get you a coffee before we get started?”
 
Tessa laughed, “No thanks, I’m pretty wired as it is. I couldn’t sleep at all on the plane and need to pass out in the hotel as soon as we get this done.”
 
She turned, noticing that Beth was eyeing her analytically with a slight frown.
 
“...Problem?” the actress asked.
 
“Um, no, no. Just...have you been feeling well?” the costumer asked her with motherly concern.
 
The actress bit her lip, “Ah, I’d thought that might come up. To be honest...I’m a lot better than I was. For the last year and a half I was...well I was extremely sick.”
 
Beth’s eyes seemed to bulge, “Oh my word, I had no idea…”
 
“I wanted it that way, rather not have poparazzi taking pics as I leave the hospital,” Tessa sighed, “and well, I lost quite a lot of weight from the treatments. Weight that I didn’t really have to lose to start with.”
 
The costumer’s face winced with sympathy, “but you look...positively healthy now…”
 
“Well, thank you. My prognosis is excellent and I’ve been following a diet and exercise program to get into shape. It hasn’t been easy, I’ve been wearing nothing but sweat pants and hoodies for nearly a year and had to rebuild some muscle,” Tessa went on, not bringing up how doctor’s had had to pull a bullet sized tumor out of the back of her head.
 
“Ah, well...I’m sure it worked well, um...,” Beth told her, pausing as Tessa pulled off her hoodie. 
 
Her shirt had rode up a bit with it, and the actress automatically pulled it back down. She didn’t notice that it immediately rode back up, well past her belly button. Beth blushed, tearing her eyes away from the younger woman to look her in the eye.
 
“I’d made some preliminaries with the measurements from Moses, I didn’t think they’d changed…,” Beth paused, “...so much…”
 
“Oh, well I think I’m about back to where I was,” Tessa said, “would you like to measure me first or try the preliminary costumes?”
 
Beth seemed nervous, biting her lip, “Well...let’s do some measurements first...I have a feeling that ...well, let’s just measure you.”
 
Tessa didn’t quite understand the strange hesitancy of the costumer. She had to presume that talk of her illness had upset her, even not going into full details Tessa wasn’t surprised. Looking at her now, she probably just looked a little thin, not like someone who’d come within a whisper of dying. She stood up straight as Beth measured her, the tape wrapping around stomach, hips, chest, thigh, calf and bicep. It was familiar to her, almost comforting, for Tessa had never had a weight problem.
 
“Um, Tessa, you used to be a 20 inch waist, right?” Beth asked her softly.
 
“Yes, I think so, I know I've always been skinny. Have I not gotten back to that yet?” Tessa returned, “Do we need to take the costumes in?”
 
“Well, not quite...I’m well, going to need to call the producer about this, unfortunately…,” Beth said with a brittle smile, “I’m sure it isn’t your fault but well, they hate it when an actress isn’t the right weight…”
 
The actress felt her cheeks color as the older woman went towards a desk phone, “Wait, they’re going to be angry I’m a little thin? I know they said that the character had “a dancer’s build” whatever that means, but there’s a month to filming for me to put on some muscle.”
 
The costumer sighed, looking at her up and down again with a sad smile, quite similar to a doctor’s with bad news.
 
“Tessa, that’s...really the opposite of the problem. Let me break this gently, how much did you used to weigh?” she asked the actress gently.
 
“Well...I mean I didn’t weigh myself every day…,” Tessa began.
 
She’d been born rather lucky. Not just white and smart in a first world country to middle class parents, but pretty as well. Tessa had preferred walks and yoga over more intense exercise, but she’d had a humming bird metabolism and as a vegetarian had never struggled with her weight.
But she remembered the doctor’s appointment after the head aches had started…
 
“I weighed about fifty kilograms, that’d be...one hundred and ten, one hundred and fifteen pounds?” she offered.
 
“Oh, so...about thirty pounds then, maybe thirty five,” Beth winced in sympathy.
 
“I’m...there’s no way I weigh less than ninety pounds!” Tessa exclaimed, eyes bulging.
 
For a moment there was silence, Beth looking at her sadly.
 
“Listen Tessa, you’re still a gorgeous young woman. And if this industry wasn’t so...shit, I’d never say this. But...you’re not the right body shape for this role at the moment…,” Beth told her, “because well...well there’s a mirror and a scale in that changing room…”
 
Stunned, Tessa walked towards the changing room as Beth began a call. She hadn’t thought herself so scrawny, she didn’t think she’d gotten much under a hundred pounds. God, no wonder she was feeling so tired…
 
Inside the dressing room was Hero Girl’s costume, a blue mini skirt with a golden belt and a blue top. It was a midriff bearing disaster and probably not the final product, which was supposed to be more like a one piece, but Tessa’s attention was more focused on the mirror and who was in it.
 
“What...what...WHAT?” Tessa gasped.
 
Her face was basically as expected: pale and somewhat freckled, with a short brown pixie cut. It wasn’t drawn as she’d expected from a year of being sick, instead her cheeks were full and rosy...very full as a matter of fact. To the point that her cheekbones were more of a suggestion.
 
And that her firm jawline was looking...soft. Soft enough to have a slight double chin that merged with a gently broader neck, instead of the swanlike neck.
 
Tessa gulped, making herself look downwards. Her pale blue t-shirt was tight, so tight that she began feeling how snug it was as she took it in. Never busty, she hadn’t worn a bra and plump, heavy looking breasts were poking at the thin fabric. Not believing her eyes, she cupped the slightly sagging bust with her hands, boob flesh over flowing her fingers. Her shirt sleeves were tightly pinching her bicep, she followed suit, pinching excess fat on her bicep and tricep.
 
“What...how…,” the actress asked herself, certain that when she’d put the clothes on they’d fit normally.
 
Always, Tessa had had a flat stomach, washboard flat. But now...now she had a real belly, a lot of her weight going to a considerable paunch. It was big enough to get a hand under, her too small shirt riding up over her belly button, which itself looked deeper. There were squeezable love handles over her hips, all merging together into this embarrassing muffin top. Sucking in her stomach brought some temporary relief, enough for her shirt to go down, but holding it in wasn’t a permanent option.
 
“There’s no way...I was...I was under my normal weight, I’m sure of it…,” Tessa said to herself, both amazed and horrified.
 
She was an educated woman. Yes, she’d been on fashion mags and photo shoots and knew how much her looks played into her success, but she was also a feminist. She knew she was worth more than her looks, that thirty pounds was nothing compared to something major, especially after going through something major. Maybe if she’d seen it creep up that would be true but...not all at once…
 
Girlish hips had turned womanly over night, stretching her yoga pants until she had a camel toe and leaving a red ring under her muffin top. She turned, wincing to see how her butt, taut and round from yoga, had ...well, fallen. It was soft and jiggly on the other side of near transparent spandex, her panties and a new patch of cellulite on each cheek. She patted it and it bounced for an uncomfortably long time, the ripple spreading to thighs that now touched. Chunky looking calves emerged from the bottom of the capris, embarrassingly thick for someone who’d always had shapely legs.
 
“Is this some sort of night mare?” she asked, blinking, pinching a softened cheek to try and wake herself up, “Fuck, am I being punked?”
 
Knowing that even a CGI mirror couldn’t make her feel the fat beneath her fingers, Tessa gingerly stepped onto the scale. Her stomach, on its own accord, sucked in as the scale blinked, as if that would help. Feeling like a death row inmate awaiting a possible pardon, the actress felt her chin buckle as she looked down to see blinking numbers.
 
For a moment, it was a laughable six hundred sixty six, surely some sort of automatic response as it calculated. Then the red numbers turned blue plummeting to a much smaller but still far too large one hundred and forty nine pounds. Thirty five pounds higher than she’d ever weighed…
 
“I...how, I’d have felt it surely,” Tessa said, remembering that she’d only been wearing sweat pants and not going out save for doctors appointments for over a year, “but I’ve been sick…”
 
Not for several months and her appetite had come back quite well, with her ordering take out several times a week.
 
“And I’ve been exercising…,” she said, knowing that a couple miles on a tread mill and stretching wasn’t going to equal the extra calories her doctors had said she should eat, “...maybe not enough…”
 
It was a cold slap of reality, far better than another one she’d had but still shocking. She’d grown up with her mother complaining about her weight, and now it was happening to her…
 
“Tessa, are you alright?” Beth asked her from the other side of the door.
 
“I...well...I’m a little chubby but otherwise alright,” the actress sighed, hand going to her stomach, “at least its not public...but shit the movie...how can this be a superhero movie if…”
 
“I talked to the producer,” the costumer told her, “and they’re very understanding…”
 
Tessa had a mind for figures, she remembered her contract and its weight clause, “...and my lawyer would be very unhappy if they bring this up in public.”
 
“Which is why they’re offering access to an exclusive and very, very secretive clinic, paid for by the studio…,” the costumer replied softly.

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?”
 

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?”
 

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?”
 

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?”
 

Love this update, this whole bonkers story is great.

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?”
 

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?”
 

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?”
 

Yes! Glad this is back. Another awesome chapter in a great story!
Nice.

And I’m glad that the fish is glad that binky is glad....not bad.  
(Hi glad, I’m Dad.).