June's yearning for fast and comfort food remained unchecked for the next six months. The only way she could focus on her work was to graze at her desk, so she upped her work-at-home days to three and moved her home p-c onto the kitchen table. Her output remained as thorough and conscientious as ever, but it was a good thing she was producing most of it electronically where she didn't have to worry about spilling anything on her paperwork.
Her caloric intake was still steadily rising, while, to compound matters, she'd grown increasingly more sedentary over the past two years. Where once June regularly left her desk to walk around the office, as much to keep herself from being bored as anything, now she only broke from her chair with two or three steps to the counter, fridge or stove. To compensate, she purchased a Sitting Walker, a device with foot pedals like an old-fashioned sewing machine, from an on-line store and used it whenever she stopped between thoughts at the keyboard. May not have burnt a lot of calories (she was now averaging over nine thousand a day), but it helped to keep her massive legs limber.
Audrey phoned June regularly at her home office, often just to chat, so the super-sized reviewer was unsurprised when, four months after her last trip, she received an invitation to be maid of honor at Audrey and Jeff's wedding. Though the thought of wearing a bride's maid dress gave her pause, she ultimately wrote back and accepted. Fortunately, the bride-to-be was friend to a plus-sized seamstress who only needed a week to get the basic outfit ready - and could do the final fitting a day before the wedding. June had been gaining weight so incessantly she knew she needed the shortest gap time possible if she was gonna have a wedding dress that fit.
As it was, when it came time two months later to pass her measurements onto Audrey, she upped each one an inch to take in account the week of gorging still ahead. In six months, she'd grown to 545 pounds, with breast, belly and hip measurements in the seventies. Her chest still inched ahead of the rest of her, giving her cleavage that widened into a large triangle of belly flesh. June was fatter than she could've ever imagined herself being. Seated, her belly spilled ahead of her dimply knees, a deepening fold stretching from her navel, and pressed into her makeshift kitchen workstation. It formed an armrest for both her forearms as she reached for the keyboard, but she had to lower her chair as far it could go to keep the top of her paunch from interfering with her typing. She'd grown quite skilled at typing right-handed with a sandwich in her other hand.
Though there were moments she regretted her new size - most often when she had to lift her burgeoning self from her well-worn desk chair - they were surprisingly infrequent. She was bound too strongly by her love of simple, unpretentious American food - not just fast food, but everything else you could find along the American motorway. As she spent more time hitting the Interstate exits for meals, she'd begun to visit some of the bigger truck stops. They didn't believe in picayune portions at truckers' restaurants, and neither did June.
She looked forward to each and every meal with growing enthusiasm. There were even moments, usually late at night, when June would lean back in her armless chair and simply marvel at her ballooning forefront. It mounded before her, covering her lap, pushing into the increasingly more limited space between her thighs, a record of so many days and nights of solid enjoyment.
As she'd gotten larger, she'd grown more frugal about spending her money on clothing. While she always made sure she had at least one good work outfit that fit, June had started scouring the online auction pages for clothing that the previous owners had either outgrown or gastrically bypassed. And though it was generally considered out-dated and unflattering, she'd even started looking through the online retro clothes stores for the largest and brightest cotton tropical muumuus she could find.
She only wore 'em around the house, would never consider going out in public in one, but she had to admit they were fun to wear. Whenever June felt too warm or settled, she'd simply lift the hem over her legs and raise her belly to the cooling air. More than once, as she waddled across her apartment in her sandals and “fat lady's dress,” she wonder what her co-workers would think if they saw her - no picture of the fashionable professional woman, she. Perhaps they believed June dressed that way all the time at home.
She still kept up her professional appearance, though perhaps not as assiduously as she had when she was skinny. Her priorities had changed, for one. It was worth more to her to ensure that she had the right dose of spices in her ground beef or on her crispy fries than to shave her legs every weekend. Her fulsome calves had still retained their shapeliness, but had developed an overlapping crease near her heels that perpetually caught her razor, while her lower thighs were also starting to impinge on her upper calf area. It also took longer for June to shave, since she had so much more area to cover: her calves were each close to thirty inches at their apex. Seated at her worktable, she could just barely glimpse 'em, but she could feel 'em heavily swaying whenever she shifted her weight in her chair.
Her bridesmaid's gown wound up hugging her tightly, but June decided not to worry since she only was gonna wear it once. The rehearsal dinner was held at Aaron's, in a small private dining room in back. Our Bride-to-Be had gained another fifty pounds since they'd last seen each other: small change compared to June, but it put the girl firmly in the mid-sized range. She clearly looked good to Jeff, who could barely keep his hands off her. The rest of the wedding party was made up of Audrey's family. The women all looked plump or bigger (none as big as June, of course), though with one exception, the males all looked average-sized.
That exception, the bride's brother Stan, had a good hundred pounds on his sis. Seated across the dining table from June, he nearly came close to matching her sandwich for sandwich, a fact that she surprisingly found exciting. He was a traveling restaurant supplies salesman, a connoisseur of roadside dining - and pretty good-lookin' to boot. Watching him leave with the rest of the men for the obligatory bachelor party, June felt the stirring of an interest that she hadn't known for a while: the man sure filled his slacks out nicely!
As the boys all departed, Bess Honeydew entered the room, pushing a cart loaded with large white boxes and a four-tiered ice cream cake. The super-sized Missus Aaron was wearing a long white apron dress that swung with her own belly apron as she waddled behind the cart, using its handles for additional support. Though she too had added some extra poundage in the past six months, the woman no longer appeared to outweigh June (and to think that there was a time when June had marveled at her size!) She handed out boxes to every member of the wedding party, and when she got to June, she gave her two.
"Goin' great guns with the candy?" June observed, after shaking the top box to verify its contents. She'd finished off her last box three months ago, so she eagerly tore open the first to scoop a small handful. Something in the mints, she knew, was a pretty potent appetite stimulant. But with or without the special dinner mints, she could eat most any time of the day and neither get full nor bored.
"Changed our minds about selling 'em," Bess said. "Not everyone appreciates what they can do, so now we just give the boxes to our friends." As June popped three mints into her mouth, she smiled approvingly. "You're lookin' really good," she declared, as June once more felt her mouth start watering hungrily. At the next table, Audrey was starting in on a fresh half-pounder.
"You missed the guys, though," June noted, but Miz Honeydew shook her head.
"They were each handed a box when they left," she assured June, "though I suspect most of 'em will be giving the candy to their wives and girlfriends. Except for Stan, of course. Him, I can count on."
"You know Stan?"
"He loaned us money to help get the Eatery started," Bess told her. "Stan and Audrey are both good friends of the family." She reached for June's box and took a mint, then placed it 'tween her own full lips. "I'm so glad she and Jeff hooked up; that last guy she was with did nothing for her."
"Never met the man," June replied between bites of her third - or was it her fourth? - cheese dog.
"You didn't miss much," Bess grinned. "Audrey tells me you gave her good advice about the guy when she needed it, though. That makes you one of the good 'uns." She reached across the table, her wonderful belly apron spilling onto the space where Stan had been dining, and she patted June on her shoulder. "Eat up," she said companionably. "There's plenty to go . . ."
June followed Bess' advice and was the last woman in the room to finish eating, polishing off nearly a fourth of the ice cream cake. When dinner was over, she returned to her motel room, switched into some of her retro clothing (after the night's gourmandizing, her 7X muumuu was much tighter than she expected, especially around her 75-inch belly and 31-inch upper arms), and sat with a one-pound bag of Peanut M&Ms in her bed, watching Unwrapped on The Food Channel. When she finished her candy, she slipped on some sandals, not even stopping to check herself in the mirror (the chances of her running into someone she knew at this hour were slim to none), left her room and slowly made her way to her car in the parking lot.
The night was cool and brightly lit by the nearby highway. Coming off the Interstate on her way into town, she'd noticed a truck stop right by the exit. Feeling like she hadn't eaten a thing all day, June decided to drive to its restaurant, a place called Nora's. Soon as she was seated, she ordered two trucker's specials: four eggs, hash browns, chopped sirloin and a giant stack of buttermilk pancakes smothered in syrup. The waitress took one look at this big ol' fat gal in a seams-stressed muumuu, hair disheveled and her makeup gone, crammed into the size-unfriendly booth. She snickered lightly and went off to put in June's order.
Where she usually ate more deliberately, here she decided to let herself go - digging into both plates with complete abandon, dropping yolk and gravy on her shelving forefront in the process. (The sirloin was especially tasty; she wondered if they shared the same meat supplier as Aaron's.) Midway into her meal, June stopped to order a plate of hash browns with her mouth full. And when the waitress placed a bowl by her decaf coffee cup with low-cal Coffee Mate, June bluntly pushed it aside and demanded real cream. "Sweetie," she asked in as thick a small-town Midwestern drawl as she could muster, "do I look like the kinda gal who does low-cal?"
"No, dear, you don't," the haggard waitress agreed, a look of grudging admiration appearing on her face. When she returned with June's ticket, the charge was only for one meal. In gratitude, June left a suitably fat tip. As she rose from her booth, her overstuffed paunch shifted, and the seams along her right torso started to give way.
When she heard the threads loudly rip, she began laughing, widening the gap by inches. And as she got back behind the driver's seat, her bulging side pushed the tear open even further. Slowly waddling back to her room, her satiated belly swaying with each step, June made sure to keep the exposed side away from the man from at the check-in desk. As she collapsed on her bed, her dress split all the way along the side. Feeling fuller than she ever had before, she fell asleep in her tattered muumuu.
Audrey's wedding was in a small country church (a good thing, since June wasn't really up for a walk down a long aisle). The bride looked lovely on her big day, even if her gown did gap a bit more than it was meant to in the back. As for June, she moved even more slowly than usual, not wishing for a repeat of last night's truck stop incident. (But, damn, those chopped steaks had been tasty!) In the end, she did fine, even if the ceremony called for her standing longer than she liked.
The reception food wasn't as inspiring as the rehearsal dinner had been, but June held her own, anyway. Seated next to Stan, she even found herself taking time off from her meal to flirt with him. He was not, thankfully, one of those fat men who felt the need to obscure his chins with facial hair (she'd always preferred clean-shaven men.) Now that she thought about it, he looked like the kind of happily round-face man that you often saw as an advertising logo chef - if anything, he was more like she'd have expected the cartoon Aaron to look than the face who graced the sign of his own restaurant.
She was hoping her favorite fast-fooder would show for the wedding, since he and wife were obviously friends of the family. But the only one to make an appearance at the reception was Bess, accompanied by the plus-sized companion June remembered seeing at lunch during one of her first visits to Aaron's. Though they weren't providing meals for the reception, she had brought enough mints to fill every bowl at the tables.
The food was plentiful, at least, and Stan was remarkably speedy when it came to getting them both refills. When it came time for the bride and groom to duck out, Audrey sidled up behind her Maid of Honor and asked if she could see her for a few minutes. Though it meant temporarily abandoning her fifth slice of chocolate fudge wedding cake, June was curious enough to follow the BBW bride out into the hallway. There, Jeff was carrying two large shopping bags in from outside.
"You may not realize it," Audrey was saying, "but we owe this all to you. So the two of us thought we'd get ya a little something extra to express our thanks." Her new hubby opened the sacks, revealing their brightly colored contents. "You told me about your latest fashion addiction, so we had our friend work up some new ones for you. They're a skosh bigger than your bridesmaid's gown, which we figured you'd like."
Stunned, June rifled through the two bags. There appeared to be enough different dresses to last her through the week.
"This must've cost you a fortune," she said, thinking of her last on-line purchases. She'd never been able to find more than one that would fit her at a time.
"Not at all," Audrey confided. "Peg got such a kick out of putting together the muumuus - she's never had 'em special ordered before - that she only charged us for the fabric." She grinned, creasing her second chin. "Of course, it was a lot of fabric. . ."
Flabbergasted, June reached to hug her friend, and, as she did so, her bridesmaid's gown loudly succumbed to the inevitable.
"Looks like I got these babies at just the right time," June chuckled, fingering the v-shaped tear that had suddenly appeared on both her gown's short sleeves.
In answer, Audrey reached into one of the sacks and slowly pulled out a bright red, florally patterned dress. "This is one of the smaller ones," she explained. "It should fit you now." Still holding the dress, she embraced her friend a second time, splitting the dress' side seams for good.
"This is wonderful," June said, taking the garment and carrying it with her into the ladies' room. There, with Audrey's help, she discarded her ruined gown and slipped the dress over her dimpled shoulders. It was roomy enough (but not too roomy!) for her 76-inch belly and slightly larger hips. After redoing her face with some of the cosmetics from Audrey's bag, she bid au revoir to her friend and returned to the reception. There, Stan met her with a puzzled expression on his face.
"You've changed your clothes," he said, once she'd reseated herself and started back in on her wedding cake.
"I had to get out of that gown," she explained once she'd swallowed her first bite. Was it her imagination or was she speaking with a thicker drawl now? "Too confining." She took another large forkful of cake, casually flicking away several crumbs as they dropped into her cleavage, then she looked at Stan. "Hope you're not offended by my dressing down," she continued, "but if I'd stayed in that outfit, I wouldn't have been able to remain here with you."
"I'm not offended at all," the fat man said, handing her his plate of cake once she'd finished hers. "As long as you're here, I wouldn't mind if you wore a potato sack!"
And that was the point where June realized: she definitely had to get to know Stan better. . .
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