Chapter 15


We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and eating and talking and eating, lying on the beach under the cloudless, blue, late-summer sky. She'd touch my arm for emphasis when she spoke; I'd brush a strand of hair from her rich, red lips. She straddled my butt to apply the suntan oil and I felt relaxation spread through my body with every stroke and touch of her warm, caressing hands. "Your back is so soft," she said, "and the skin is like velvet." I felt the layer of blubber moving and rolling under her strong hands, and I imagined I were a buttery piece of pastry being rolled and kneaded; the heat from the sun and Mara's hands and her thighs would bake me, and later I'd be ready to be eaten...

She climbed off of me after a while, leaving me relaxed to the point of immobility. When I had finally gathered the strength to roll on my side, I discovered that she'd been sitting quietly, staring at me. She roused herself from hidden thoughts and asked if I wanted a cookie. "What a silly question," I answered. "Of course I want a cookie!" She laughed, then looked inside the white paper bakery bag, and pulled out a miniature black-and-white cookie, and proceeded to place it in my open and waiting mouth.

"If you keep this up," she said, "you're going to be fatter than me in no time at all!" "You're not THAT fat," I said after I'd swallowed and licked the brown icing off my lips. "No, I guess not. Not really. Not right now, anyway." "How much do you weigh?" I asked. She shook her head, saying teasingly, "Don't you know that you never ask a lady her weight?" "'She's not heavy; she's my sister!'" I sang -- badly.

She said, "Don't sing!", put another cookie in my mouth and one in hers, then said, "I'm about 260 right now -- I've lost a lot of weight over the last year." "What shame," I said, "losing some luscious Mara." "It is a shame in some ways, but -- it's also a lot more manageable!" "I could manage anything!" I said, filching a cookie from the bag. "Oh, yeah. Big talker, you are! You're barely even chubby! How much do you weigh?"

"173 this morning," I said, rolling on my back and patting my belly, which was stuffed with the day's continual eating and seemed so swollen as to defy gravity. "But, after baguettes and sandwiches, and cheese and cookies and wine and salads and shrimp and olives and ice cream and cornbread and croissants, I'm probably like 300 pounds right now!" "I think it takes a LITTLE longer than that," she said.

"How long did it take you?" I asked. She fed each of us another cookie, thought for a minute, then said, "It's getting kind of late, so -- why don't we head inside and I'll tell you after we get showered and dressed." I agreed and she popped two more cookies in my open mouth, two more in hers, then stood up and started gathering up the blankets, towels, discarded bathing suits and assorted refuse from our day-long repast. When I stood up to help, I felt gravity's pull for sure -- the weight of my gorged stomach was more than I'd expected. "It's weird," I said, "but I never really think about how much I've eaten until I actually can feel the weight of all the food sloshing around inside me." Mara put her palm over my belly-button, caressing the tautness of my skin and its layer of fat; I reciprocated, my hand sinking into her much-thicker blubber. "Fat feels soooo nice," I said. "Why doesn't everyone like fat?" "'Cause if everyone LIKED fat, then everyone would BE fat, and you and I wouldn't get to be goddesses!" "Reductio ad absurdo," I said as we started our trudge across the sand. "Are you talking dirty to me?" she joked, and pinched my butt.

As soon as we got inside and closed the screen door, she dropped everything on the floor and ran for the bathroom, yelling, "I've got the shower first!" I chased after her -- far enough back that I could appreciate the swing of her overly-generous hips -- and arrived in the bathroom a second after her, only to be greeted by a splash of ice cold water. "Damn!" she said. "It's hardly worth racing when you have to wait five minutes for the thing to heat up! But -- don't worry -- I don't take long showers. Never more than an hour or two!" She climbed in and pulled the curtain closed. I stood for a moment, entranced by the play of her distorted silhouette on the cream-colored cloth, then pulled the curtain aside and climbed in with her.

She giggled, then said, "You know, sis, it's been so long since I've showered with anyone, that I didn't even think of it! I mean, Zake and I -- there's no WAY the two of us can fit in any shower at the same time." I took the bath puff and lathered it up and started soaping her soft back. "Did you ever think of going to the carwash?" I asked. "You'd probably fit there. Just make sure you don't get the hot wax treatment!" "What a little bitch!" she laughed, turning around so we were soapy belly to soapy belly, then reaching around me and spanking my butt. When I was done lathering her, she took her turn lathering me, lingering on my breasts and my pussy, then suddenly kissing me and saying, "Stop turning me on!"

We shampooed each other's hair, then shut the water and dried off. "I'm not going to bother with makeup," she said, but I've got to let my hair dry a little, so... maybe we can hang out in the Florida room... have a little snack -- it must be at least half-an-hour since we've eaten anything. A girl could waste away!" We wrapped ourselves in towels, which quickly came unwrapped as we descended like locusts on a bag of tortilla chips and a bowl of guacamole. "So you were going to tell me another story," I said, popping an over-burdened chip in my mouth and dropping a glob of green stuff on my boob. I tried to reach it with my tongue, but Mara was out of her seat and beat me to it, and I shivered a little as she "accidentally" brushed my nipple with her tongue.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I was going to tell you about how fat I was." "And how long it took," I piped in. "Yes. And also why I lost some.

"Well," she began, "after that first time Zake and I made love, I didn't bother going back into my bedroom anymore. Instead, we spent every free moment in the kitchen, the dining room or the master bedroom. We feasted for every meal, eating quantities of food that would have put a herd of elephants to shame. For months, we had Thanksgiving for breakfast, Christmas for lunch, a wedding buffet for dinner. We fed each other and encouraged each other and used each other as serving platter and table. I would coat him with warmed chocolate and lick it from his vast stomach and, like some giant, gentle cat, he would lap cream from my deepening belly-button.

"We moved a refrigerator into the bedroom, then a freezer to hold the five gallon tubs of ice cream which we plowed through at an ever-increasing pace. It wasn't long before Zake had a gas-line brought into the bedroom and installed a new stove so we could do our food preparation and food consumption and lovemaking without ever having to leave the bedroom. We were engaged by then, and had set the wedding date for September 15, chosen the location, selected the food, and purchased the dress. I kept getting fatter, so I went every couple of weeks to have the dress refitted. The seamstress thought she was reassuring me when she said, 'Don't worry, this happens to a lot of brides. Nervousness, you know.' I smiled to myself, knowing that it doesn't often happen like this!

"There was one week in the late summer where we never even left our bed. We just ate and ate and fed each other incessantly, caressing and stroking the rolls within rolls we were each developing. The bed was protesting mightily with every move we made during our vigorous lovemaking, so Zake had a new, extra-reinforced bed brought in; that produced a momentary panic, since I'd been walking around naked for so long that I hadn't realized that I couldn't even fit any of my clothes over my enormous thighs. Luckily, Zake had some sweatpants that fit me, albeit snugly, and he had Andy bring him over some clothes from a local Enormous Man shop. He asked if I wanted Andy to bring some clothes for me, but -- although I was comfortable with my newly huge body when I was alone with Zake, I was embarassed at the thought of giving my measurements to Andy -- little did I know back then of HIS preferences!

"Well, the new bed came and we quickly resumed our feast, gorging ourselves and each other to new heights of excess. One of our favorite tricks of that week was working our way from either end of a three-foot hero laden with pounds of cold slices of lamb while he laid on his back and I rode his cock.

"Then, one night, at the very end of that week, we had prepared almost an entire lamb -- one of his uncle's prize-winners -- determined to consume the entire thing or explode in the attempt. We were working on the lamb chops, which Zake would serve after searing the outside to a rich black crust. He was sitting, propped up against the wall as I brought him his fourth or fifth chop, then heaved my bulk over him and climbed into the bed myself. Well, he bobbled the plate and let out a horrible scream as a lamb chop that was practically still on fire fell from the plate and landed on the tender flesh of his expanded stomach. He pulled it off and I quickly grabbed a bag of ice cubes from the freezer which he proceeded to cover the burn with.

"It put a major damper on the evening, so we cleaned up and went to sleep, but he woke me after a short while because he was in a lot of pain. When I looked at the burn, it was blistered and oozing and I insisted we go to the emergency room. The sweats I'd worn just a few days before were skin-tight now, and Zake's new clothes were in a similar state. The burn was right on a crease in his belly, so sitting in the car was an excruciating torture for him, as well as a challenge for me, since the enormous quantity of food I'd consumed over the previous months and that week in particualar had swollen my stomach to such proportions that it interfered with my steering. Then, at the hospital, I sat, looking at my stomach swollen out over half of my thighs and watching while he paced, becoming more and more agitated and growing shorter of breath.

"The nurse finally called us into the examination room and asked Zake to remove his shirt. She tried not to react at the sight of his incredible bulk, but you could see the disapproval in her eyes, which wasn't lessened at all when she looked over at me. She looked over the burn a little bit, then wrote on the chart and left us while she went on to find the doctor. There was a doctor's scale in the room, and I couldn't resist its pull, so I climbed on and started sliding the weights: 100... 200... 300... 330... 340... 350... 352! I'd been with Zake for nearly a year and in that time I'd put on 250 pounds! And if I was 352 pounds, why Zake must've been pushing 600!

"I was amazed and shocked, and when I turned around to see that Zake was staring at me, I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a glimpse of his burn, and realized that it was exactly the shape of a lambchop. It was red and oozing where the meat had touched his skin and darker and more serious looking where the chop's bone had made contact. An incredible range of emotions ran over me at that second -- pity, revulsion, horror, empathy -- but the one that won out and expressed itself was absurdity. I started to laugh and quickly became hysterical; my flesh was shaking and wobbling in rhythmical gales of laughter, while Zake was totally confused, asking, "What? What is it? Are you laughing or crying?"

"I couldn't speak, but I pulled a compact out of my purse and handed it to him, managing to convey the message that he should look at the burn. He did, and I could see a smile spread slowly over his face and he said, 'I am branded with the emblem of my homeland's greatest export. How fitting!' And he started laughing, too, the great bulk of his belly heaving as he roared along with the joke that had been played upon him.

"We had regained some of our composure when the doctor came in, looked at the burn and, while taking blood-pressure and pulse readings, asked what had happened. 'What does the burn look like?' Zake asked him. 'Well... actually, it looks like a lamb-chop,' the doctor said. 'Yes, it was,' Zake confirmed, saying, 'I guess it's just another one of the dangers of overeating' -- at which we both burst out in another fit of uncontrollable laughter. The doctor and the nurse both shook their heads at our presumed insanity, then the doctor said, 'A more serious danger of overeating is the fact that your pulse and pressure are both ridiculously high. Have you been experiencing any shortness of breath? Any pains or numbness in your extremities? Any blurred or obstructed vision?' Zake didn't reply, but his smile immediately faded away, and I knew the answer was yes.

"We drove home in silence, then, exhausted as we were from the physical and emotional stress of the last several hours, we sat down in the living room and talked. He told me of his grandfather, who had had the honor of being the 'fattest man in New Zealand' before he died when Zake was 12. His 800-pound body was borne by twenty pallbearers and buried in two coffins that the undertaker had joined together. He'd been in good spirits all his days, despite the fact that he was imprisoned and immobilized by his bulk and confined to his bedroom for the last 10 years of his life. It was easy, Zake told me, to forget about those aspects while we were having fun and making love, but he knew deep down that he didn't want to share his grandfather's fate.

"And I thought about how, through Zake's love and charity, I had gained control of myself in my battle against drugs, only to lose that control in our year-long orgy of food.

"So, we got healthy. We didn't diet, but we didn't stuff ourselves continually. We had our binges and our fun -- we still haven't forgotten the three-foot hero trick -- but we don't do it every night. The refrigerator and freezer and stove are gone from the bedroom and in their place is a small gym, consisting of a treadmill, a Heart-Cycle, and a ski-machine. Zake couldn't walk for five minutes at first without collapsing in exhaustion, but now he walks five miles every night. I love being fat -- the way it feels, the way it looks, the freedom of being able to eat what I want, when I want without the slightest concern. I feel ripe and juicy and ready to burst out in joy at any given moment. I love being attuned to my body -- knowing that my body likes this weight-- I get bigger occasionally, and smaller occasionally, but I always seem to come back to this familiar neighborhood. And Zake -- he's as big as a horse, but as strong as a horse, too -- and I know we're going to be sharing ourselves for a long, long time!"

When she finished talking, I went over and hugged her, and she hugged me back with zest and love. Then we got dressed and made the long trip back. She surprised me for a minute, because I was certain she knew where she was going, yet she pulled up in front of a neighbor's house, a few doors away. "I live over there," I said, thinking that she might have grown confused by the unfamiliarity of the street in the early twilight. "I know," she answered, "but you wouldn't want me to do this right in front of your living room window." With that, she leaned over and kissed me, the softness of her tongue slipping past my lips and finding my tongue while our lips sealed together and our eyes closed deep and our hearts opened wide.

It seemed like hours before we separated, and days before we stopped staring into one another's eyes, and weeks before she finally brought the car in front of my house and let me out. My mother had dinner waiting when I got inside, and despite my fullness, I ate heartily, helped clean up, then retired to my room.

I was laying on my bed, languorously stroking my gorged belly and reflecting on Mara's long and moving tale, feeling her hands on my skin, her lips on mine, her voice like music in my ears -- when my mother knocked on the door, then came in, while I hurriedly pulled my shirt down over the swollen globe of flesh.

"You had a couple of calls today," she said. "Jess called twice, and someone named Ari called, saying that he had really important news that you'd be dying to hear and that you should call him whenever you get in -- no matter how late." I thanked her and she lingered at the door for a moment, saying, "So we're on for Thursday -- Waist Watchers?" I assured her that I'd join her, then she closed the door and I wasted no time in dialing Ari's phone number.