~BBW, ~BHM, ~BBFamily, ~XWG, Sex - When the girlfriend's away, the Mother-In-Law will play...at getting her daughter's new beau into an 'acceptable' shape!
This'll be a slow burner - expect part II quite soon, where the gaining proper will begin.
Part I: A Daughter of Bacchus, or: "How I Met Her Mother"
"You sure you don't want that coffee?"
I shook my head at Dean Keaton's offer, holding up a hand in polite refusal. I thought I'd already told him I wasn't a coffee-drinking man, especially not late in the afternoon, but perhaps his courtesy had outweighed his memory. I never touched the stuff, it interfered with my sleep.
"Suit yourself," he shrugged, and after handing his spare change to the smiling girl at the cafeteria counter, he made to grab some sugar packets, only for her hand to playfully slap him away.
"Uh-uh, Ollie! Those aren't free anymore. 5 cents, remember? It was your policy."
"Drat it all," he grumbled, gesturing his free hand in the air, "Trapped in a prison of my own making!". Outbursts such as this were common to those of us who knew the Dean, a veteran stage actor and renowned scholar of both Shakespeare and Beckett. A waggle of his left eyebrow, and I understood his meaning immediately.
“I’ve got this, Mr. Keaton,” I quickly replied, handing the girl a five and quickly snagging one of the Helfy Froot bars they’d been required to keep at hand of late. Raspberry...not exactly my favourite.
“Thank you, m’boy! Though I believe this is the fifth time today I’ve had to remind you to call me Ollie.” He told everyone to do this, and most of us in the faculty did - except at those times when we felt a little extra pressure to be respectful. Today, for me, was one of those times, and you could have measured it by collecting the sweat from my brow.
As soon as we were back in his office, Ollie barely sipped his coffee before getting straight to the point. “Jeff, we both know you’re the best candidate I’ve got.”
“I - that’s - what?!” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. We’d spent the entire day discussing grades, events, budget problems, the peculiar green mould that had been growing in one corner of the campus pool and what we both liked and disliked about the films of Jack Clayton. I was beginning to think I’d wasted my day off for nothing. Now he was throwing me in the deep end, and with an overzealous comment to boot.
(I mean, it’s not as if it wasn’t true. I was pretty much the best candidate he was going to get. But I wasn’t expecting him to tell me so.)
“You’ve probably got much better people - ” I began, regaining my composure, but he shushed me.
“Oh, please. I’ve read your doctorate dissertation, it was the finest I’ve seen outside of Harvard. You’ve been here a year and you’re already head of the English department. Now, I could give this to Sharon Atkins, but they tell me she’s waiting to hear back from Doubleday about her novel, and we both know how that woman can write, so she won’t stick with it. Or I could get Herb Knight, but we both know there’s only three or four years left in that artificial heart of his before he retires or it grows legs and runs away. I’m left with you, Jeff, and as much as I’d like to give you the job I’m afraid there’s one thing that worries me.”
“What would that be?” I asked, genuinely curious. As well-acquainted as I was with the Dean, I couldn’t imagine any huge character failing on my part that would mark me down in his eyes.
“Let me answer that with another question. How well did you know Vice-Dean Secombe before his...passing?”
“We were friends...not best friends, but we had a drink together once or twice.”
“Precisely! That’s precisely what I meant. The first thing you thought of was how he used to buy you a drink now and again. That’d be the first thing I’d think of too - apart from the obvious, of course.” Sitting back in his chair, he made a mime in front of his torso as if handling a large longbow. I didn’t get it until he puffed out his cheeks.
Vice-Dean Edwin Secombe, or “Ned” as he liked to be called, had always seemed to match Dean Keaton’s dramatic attitude for work with his grand attitude for life outside of work. As a renowned Professor of philosophy and once-lecturer in the Classics, it was rumoured by some of the more imaginative students that he was the incarnation of the God Bacchus. In his office he was cool and mellow, possessing a near-Zen Buddhist calm; but at parties, campus events, dances - well, pretty much anywhere music and alcohol could be found - he took on the form of a laughing, singing giant, always able to materialise food out of one hand and a beverage into the other.
‘Giant’ might have been the right term for him, too - to put it politely, he could have made two of me, and not by cutting me in half. Freshmen nicknames for him were “The Boulder”, or “The Kingpin” amongst the nerdier circles (I never got that one). Rumours would fly around of the titanic lunches that his secretary would shepherd into the depths of his office each day, never to be seen again.
However, in spite of his girth and the lust for life that seemingly came from and added to it, his pudgy hands never once left a full glass or piled-up plate to find themselves pawing a beautiful young freshman’s waist. I can tell you that for a fact, no matter what hearsay might have gone around between staff and students. As lustful as he might have been at a bar or a table, his other desires stayed firmly at home. How do I know? Well...let’s get back to my story.
“Now, I’m not a foolish man,” the Dean was saying. “I know that it takes more than brains and qualifications to take Ned’s place. He was the Yang to my Yin, the rich cheese to my dusty chalk. I got to be Dean by being a professional; he got to be Vice-Dean by being liked and always buying beers. Why, I might not be married if he hadn’t recommended me the perfect Indian restaurant in the city to propose to Phillipa in. And there’s my problem with you.”
He stood up in his desk, empathising his 6’4”, lean-yet-muscly frame. For a man in his late fifties, he was in very good shape. I cringed back, involuntarily.
“You’re never at a party unless you’re invited, and you drink like you were raised by the local chapter of the A.A. You’re a damn good academic, but we already have one of those in the head office. That’s me. I need to know, m’boy, that you can fill his shoes, so to speak. I’m not sure you’re as...big a man as Ned was, or whether you even could be.”
“What would you have me do, Ollie?” I asked, trying not to let the small worry in the back of my head make it fully into my brain. “I have at least one way of proving my worth”, I said, reaching for the binder in which sat my dissertation.
“Save it. I have another way. And mine’s...bigger.” I stared at him quizzically. “As in, it’s big of me. Hmph, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain it to you...but never mind, perhaps it was a tad too esoteric. You were eyeing that woman in the pink bathing suit, weren’t you?”
I sat up straight. I swear, sometimes it seemed like he was trying to make his entire life one long comedic drama. Taking his bait, I breathed out and grinned, caught. “When we went by the pool? Yeah. She wasn’t that bad.”
This of course was a gross understatement. That girl was *fiery*, a vision in pink and flower-patterns, her long black curly hair spilling over her lithe frame and her cute little buns forming a neat upside-down heart as she cooled down on the edge of the pool. What I’d have given to -
“Her name’s Vanessa Secombe. His daughter.”
I was glad I’d said no to that coffee. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear his booming laugh when I spat it onto my lap. “Whuh - *her* But she’s - ”
“Pick your next word carefully,” he said, punctuating this remark with a single raised finger. “He was a great friend of mine and I will not have anyone speak ill of him, dead or no.”
“...Modestly endowed,” I said. “She doesn’t resemble him at all.”
“All the better for her. She’s kept it quiet that she’s his daughter so no-one would think she’s getting extra credit from Daddy. How one could get credit as a Psych Major from a Classics professor we’ll never know, but then people would have talked anyway. She graduates with the others in a week’s time. I want you to get to know her.”

“How so?” I asked, as he quickly circled his desk.
“Talk to her, buy her lunch. Ask her what kind of a man her father was in the one place you didn’t know him - outside of the office. You’ll have the summer break. Don’t think of this as part of the interview. The job is yours, it’s right for you, I’ve no doubt about it. But, well...I want to know that you’re right for the job.”
He opened the door, pointing with all the gravity of the Spirit of Christmas Future in the direction of the gym. “Who knows, Jeff. You and she might end up as sweethearts,” he said, elbowing me in the ribs as I left.
“I’ll try to be as professional as possible, Ollie,” I smiled back as I strode purposefully away. Who was I kidding, though? The job I’d been hungering after since starting work as a Professor was mine for the asking, and all I had to do was make friends with a beautiful girl! That is, if I could pluck up the courage.
I stopped for a second in the hallway, watching assorted smiling young people mill about from class to cafeteria and back. Ollie was right, I was a bit uptight...the wildness of my own college days had been reigned in as soon as I faced the Big Bad Outside World, and I’d not felt the need to unwind with anything greater than a good book and a glass of wine at the end of the day in years. What was I going to learn from this daughter of Bacchus? How could I, a dry and dusty fossil of a man, even attempt to ask her to have lunch with me?
“You know what’s funny?”, I said absent-mindedly.
“No, but...you’re going to...tell me,” replied Nessa. We’d just finished our third session of immaculate, frenzied love-making for the evening and she was busy catching her breath.
“When Ollie first told me to go talk to you, that time,” I said, grinning down at her, “I said I was going to be as professional as possible.” I kissed the tip of her nose, revelling in the immensely cute way it instinctively wriggled when touched. Interrupting her reply with another kiss, full on the lips, that lasted far longer than I’d anticipated, I moved down to her chin, then her neck, and kept moving over her supple, sculpted athletic body.
“Oh?”, she replied, partly because I’d given her right nipple a quick pinch. “So your idea of professional is to end your first evening with a girl with your tongue down her throat and both hands on her backside?”
“What, like this?” I said, pinching her in the aforementioned area, eliciting a tiny squeal that told me I was going to get it just as soon as she’d finished letting me kiss down her smooth, waspish waist down to the beautiful area beneath.
This day, our six-month anniversary, had gone like a dream, just as my new position of Vice-Dean had. My darling Nessa, it turned out, was just as much possessed of cheer as her departed father, perhaps more so. After all, Ned required an evening of music and a wallet-crushing amount of beers to awaken the party spirit in other people.
As it had turned out after that fateful first lunch, with Nessa it took just a smirk...a wink...the touch of fingertip upon fingertip...to turn an otherwise dried-up man into a wild beast. That first night with her on the town might have been the best I’d ever had; we ended up so drunk we were daring each other to capture flags from atop government buildings or bathe naked in a fountain together.
Now, I was Vice-Dean, Nessa was in the middle of her Doctorate, and we were happier than either of us could ever remember being. Deliriously so, in fact. Though, of course, that happiness could not last.
Nessa’s studies were taking her across the country to participate as an intern in a forensic psychologist’s lab in NY, there to add to her studies - an internship that would last her five months, and one that began in the next week. Maybe that’s why that night of vodka-fuelled passion seemed so particularly special; or because it was our six-month anniversary, as I mentioned before.
As we bathed in the warm afterglow from our fifth session - futilely contemplating the idea of calling it a night - she suddenly cuddled up to me in a position which I knew instinctively meant that she wanted to convince me to do something that I might not want to. “Sweeeetyyyyy?” she stage-whispered.
“Mm?” I replied, wrapping my arm around her waist and preparing a breath in case I needed to sigh theatrically.
“You know how Mom’s coming to visit tomorrow?”

Ah yes, the widow Secombe, though Nessa had told me she preferred to be called Mrs Lu, her maiden name, and always had been. I knew little of her - she had gone to spend time with her family back in Hong Kong since her husband’s passing - save that Nessa didn’t speak about her very often. Not in a resentful or angry way, just...she never seemed to think the subject worth speaking about at length. This made Mrs Lu something of a mystery, and I was surprised that she’d been brought up so suddenly.
“Yeah? Why, do you want to cancel it? You never talk about her.”
“I know, I know...you’ll see why. I don’t want to cancel, I wanted to warn you...she’s not going back to Hongkers. She’s back for good, and she’ll probably visit. A lot.”
I failed to see the problem. “Which means...”
“Which means you’ll have to handle her while I’m away, and I just want you to know what you’re in for. You remember my Dad, right?”
“Like he was my long-lost, awesome uncle.”
“He was...well, he was a lot more uptight when he was younger. Mom, she just has this...influence on people. It’s hard to describe. I mean, for instance -” She cuddled up to me tightly, pressing her wriggly little body against my washboard abs. (I work out, why not? Just because I’m an academic doesn’t mean I don’t have time to get to the gym.) “I didn’t always look like this, you know?”
“No, I don’t.” She’d never shown me pictures of herself when she was younger, which I figured was her business. “Why, what was so - ”
“Never mind, never mind. Just...promise me you’ll show some restraint while she’s around, OK? Don’t let her tempt you.”
My mind was racing. I was expecting the blood-and-thunder Mother-in-Law stereotype of old, which so many of my males friends had attested as a real danger, but this was making her sound like a wild nymphomaniac! “Alright...I guess I can be more...conservative?”
“Promise?” She looked up at me. This seemed really important to me.
“Promise.”
“Good. Now...enough talk about the old me. Why don’t you show how much you appreciate the me of the here-and-now?” she grinned, letting her left hand travel south from my chest.
“You minx,” I replied, and stuck my tongue in her ear. A cat couldn’t have shrieked as loud.
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Then came the day I got introduced to Mrs. Lu.
Nessa had gone to spend an hour or two helping her unpack at her house before coming back to our apartment. I spent the evening after work making the place presentable, tidying up and laying out the best dishes on the table. I noticed Nessa had done nothing for dinner except put on a tomato soup in one of those blender-type machines that chops the ingredients and cooks the soup afterwards. Cousinargs or something, I don’t know.
When I looked at the stove, I found a quickly-scribbled note - “No need!”
What could *that* mean, I wondered? In any case, I decided not to prepare anything else. Evidently Mrs. Lu was of a more frugal nature.
I’d just changed into my most inoffensive, laid-back outfit, poured the soup into a beautiful dish and poured myself a glass of wine when I heard the latch unlock and some...heavy footsteps.
“Ah, you must be Jeffrey!”, boomed an impressive voice from the hall, with a hint of Bostonian accent to it.
I saw now why Nessa didn’t often speak of her mother. She...didn’t have the words.
Many had called Ned Secombe a God born in human flesh, as I mentioned. Had they met Mrs Lu-Secombe, as she might once have been called, they’d have perhaps considered that he was married to a God incarnate. She *radiated*, dammit, with a kind of crackling inner light. Her cheery smile, her bubbly voice, the spring in her step - one could not help but like her as soon as see her.
As for that spring, well...it wasn’t just in her step. She bounced, dear reader. Everywhere. I’ve heard of women with her figure referred to as having an “Apple” shape, but hers was more like a ball, smooth and round and bouncing everywhere. Her magnificent belly, jutting forward within her tight summer dress, was framed by a bosom larger than Nessa’s head. Her many-chins and padded cheeks added to the neverending cheerful expression her face sported, and the thickness of her upper arms served as an extra pair of cushions as she squeezed me powerfully to her in one of the most satisfactory hugs I’ve ever received. Even her hair, long black curls that she must surely have gifted her daughter with, was arrayed in a mass of curls down to her shoulders that bounced as ably as any other part of her inspiring anatomy. She was...astounding.
“My little Nessie has told me all about you. I was worried you were only after her to get her Dad’s old job, but you look just her type, mm?” Her titanic squeeze increased, pushing me embarrassingly closer to that capacious bosom. “Skinny as a rail.”
I’d never felt this way about a woman before...never been so awed by one. I’d seen my share of fat women, of course, but none of them with such...divinity. And certainly none of them were the adoring mother of my girlfriend of the time, of course. Surely this beautiful behemoth, as attractive as she was (though I was loath to admit it) wasn’t the sex maniac Nessa had hinted at? She seemed so maternal. As if she were born to be a mother.
Nessa strode in behind Mrs. Lu as I was released, panting slightly and muttering something about how nice it was to finally meet her. It might as well not have been Nessa, though - one could hardly tell through the volume of large, foil-covered plates hefted in front of her face.
“What...what’s this?” I half-stammered, sipping at my wine surreptitiously while handing her a glass.
“Ah, thank you dear. Well, I couldn’t stop by without giving you a good feeding, now could I?” she beamed. “Seeing what a skinny minnie my poor only daughter’s getting - “
“Mom”, snapped an unmistakeable (and unmistakably irritated) voice from behind the tower of plates. “Less talk about my figure, please. Little help, Jeff?”
I rushed to take some of the weight out of Vanessa’s arms.
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Such a meal. I have not the time to tell you of all of the treats she laid before us that evening, with flavours of every continent and leftovers that could have stocked our larder each day for the next year. Roast duck in the classical orange sauce, Moroccan lamb with couscous, Mongolian hotpot...it seemed impossible that she could have whipped this all up in the day since she’d returned from Hong Kong, but I never mentioned it. I was too swollen with gratitude that she’d laid it on for us. Or, more accurately, swollen with the food. My normally slim stomach puffed out well over the modest belt-line I was accustomed to.
Mrs. Lu turned out to be twice the personality that I could remember Ned “Boulder” Secombe being. Before she’d even met her husband, she’d spent half of her childhood with one parent in Boston and the other with another in “Hongkers” (as she and her daughter often termed Hong Kong, for reasons beyond my imagination). She’s travelled around the world, twice, as an English teacher, volunteered as an aid worker in Africa and spent five years as a comic stage actress touring around Europe. Then she’d found Ned (at a wine-and-cheese dinner, of course), and “fixed him”.
“How so?” I asked, ignoring the furtive shushing gestures and sharp kicks from Nessa.
“Oh, before he met me he looked just like you, Jeffrey...the poor man,” she sighed wistfully into her wine glass, taking a hearty gulp. “Without me, he’d have barely *tasted* his life before it got taken away from him. I put some meat on his bones...the way you ought to be doing, girly”, she winked at Nessa as if hinting at an old family secret. My usually mellow-mannered girlfriend groaned and quickly tried to change the subject.
When she’d said her charming goodbyes (leaving us with a whole vanilla-and-chocolate layer cake to divide between us when stomachs were emptier) and left to take the bus home, Nessa thumped me on the arm as soon as the door closed.
“What was that for?” I half-joked. “I made a good impression, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t have to encourage her! This is what I was talking about!”, she snapped, not placated in the least. I tried to hold her shoulders but she shrugged me away, going back to the kitchen to clean up.
“Nessa...what exactly is your problem with your mother?” I asked gently from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got to talk about it sooner or later.”
“I know, it’s just...” she sighed. “She’s got this obsession with food. I think in her head, eating a lot means living a better life.”
“So? It seems to be working out for her.”
“It doesn’t work out for everyone!”, she said, angrily throwing a plate into the sink. “You have no idea what it was like for me as a kid...I was pudgy from the day I was born and I never grew out of it.”
She was shaking a little, and I hugged her from behind. “You never told me about this, baby...”
“I was scared you’d laugh at me the way everyone else did. All the kids...they used to call me Pudge, and Lardo, and, and...” she was crying a little. “They’d sing ‘This Little Piggy’ when my parents came to pick me up. That’s why I told Dad not to let anyone know I was his. I didn’t want everyone to think of me the way I used to be. The big fat idiot.”
“But you’re not - ”
“It’s always been hanging over me. Back when I started doing Psych, any time anyone told me they had Mommy issues, I’d just tell them ‘Mine’s Bigger’.” She smiled, sadly. “Honestly, Jeff, would you have taken one look at me if I was anything like my Mom?”
“Her specifically?” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“What?!”
“I mean, uh, she’s such a nice person, I don’t think I’d judge, physical, um - ” I backtracked. This was a more difficult subject to talk about than I’d thought.
Her face took on an expression of curiosity mixed with disgust. “Don’t tell me you’re turned on by her.”
“Not at all!” I lied furtively. “No, it’s just...she’s like your father. All warm and friendly. You can’t help but like her. I think that’s where you got it from.”
She couldn’t help but smile at that, but still sighed and laid her head on my shoulder. “That’s not all I got from her...you don’t want to know what I looked like as a teen. I was a blimp. It took forever to get where I am now.”
“Babe, you know I’d love you whatever you look like,” I said, kissing her forehead tenderly. That was most certainly not a lie, and she knew it.
“Yeah, just...I wouldn’t love me, if I were bigger, you know? Being fat is gross. It might have worked for Mom and Dad, but not for me and you.” She looked up. “Right? You’re not going to get fat, right?”
“Okay, okay,” I laughed, not taking her worry seriously. “You know me, Mister Lifetime Gym Membership. I’ve always watched my figure.”
“You better. And you better keep your promise.” She poked me right in the navel. “Because today’s little feast? That was just the beginning. She’s going to come back and try it again and again, and you’d better hold out and not ask for seconds or she’ll get to you the way she gets to everyone.” I looked at her, concerned. “I know how it sounds. I love her to pieces, really, but I’ve seen her get everyone fat. Me, my friends, my co-workers...even with Dad it seemed like she kept daring him to get bigger. Maybe if he hadn’t taken that dare...”
She let that question hang in the air. Which was odd, as I’d been assured that Ned’s cardiac arrest was entirely stress-related. Big as he’d been, he’d always been a one for exercise as well.
“I understand, sweetness. I won’t let her get to me. You’ll come back and this tummy of mine...” I pressed her tightly to me - “Will be just as flat as yours.”
“Good. I’m glad. Now do the dishes, will ya? *Walking Dead* is on in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes ma’am.”
This'll be a slow burner - expect part II quite soon, where the gaining proper will begin.
Mine's Bigger
by Jimbob
Part I: A Daughter of Bacchus, or: "How I Met Her Mother"
"You sure you don't want that coffee?"
I shook my head at Dean Keaton's offer, holding up a hand in polite refusal. I thought I'd already told him I wasn't a coffee-drinking man, especially not late in the afternoon, but perhaps his courtesy had outweighed his memory. I never touched the stuff, it interfered with my sleep.
"Suit yourself," he shrugged, and after handing his spare change to the smiling girl at the cafeteria counter, he made to grab some sugar packets, only for her hand to playfully slap him away.
"Uh-uh, Ollie! Those aren't free anymore. 5 cents, remember? It was your policy."
"Drat it all," he grumbled, gesturing his free hand in the air, "Trapped in a prison of my own making!". Outbursts such as this were common to those of us who knew the Dean, a veteran stage actor and renowned scholar of both Shakespeare and Beckett. A waggle of his left eyebrow, and I understood his meaning immediately.
“I’ve got this, Mr. Keaton,” I quickly replied, handing the girl a five and quickly snagging one of the Helfy Froot bars they’d been required to keep at hand of late. Raspberry...not exactly my favourite.
“Thank you, m’boy! Though I believe this is the fifth time today I’ve had to remind you to call me Ollie.” He told everyone to do this, and most of us in the faculty did - except at those times when we felt a little extra pressure to be respectful. Today, for me, was one of those times, and you could have measured it by collecting the sweat from my brow.
As soon as we were back in his office, Ollie barely sipped his coffee before getting straight to the point. “Jeff, we both know you’re the best candidate I’ve got.”
“I - that’s - what?!” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. We’d spent the entire day discussing grades, events, budget problems, the peculiar green mould that had been growing in one corner of the campus pool and what we both liked and disliked about the films of Jack Clayton. I was beginning to think I’d wasted my day off for nothing. Now he was throwing me in the deep end, and with an overzealous comment to boot.
(I mean, it’s not as if it wasn’t true. I was pretty much the best candidate he was going to get. But I wasn’t expecting him to tell me so.)
“You’ve probably got much better people - ” I began, regaining my composure, but he shushed me.
“Oh, please. I’ve read your doctorate dissertation, it was the finest I’ve seen outside of Harvard. You’ve been here a year and you’re already head of the English department. Now, I could give this to Sharon Atkins, but they tell me she’s waiting to hear back from Doubleday about her novel, and we both know how that woman can write, so she won’t stick with it. Or I could get Herb Knight, but we both know there’s only three or four years left in that artificial heart of his before he retires or it grows legs and runs away. I’m left with you, Jeff, and as much as I’d like to give you the job I’m afraid there’s one thing that worries me.”
“What would that be?” I asked, genuinely curious. As well-acquainted as I was with the Dean, I couldn’t imagine any huge character failing on my part that would mark me down in his eyes.
“Let me answer that with another question. How well did you know Vice-Dean Secombe before his...passing?”
“We were friends...not best friends, but we had a drink together once or twice.”
“Precisely! That’s precisely what I meant. The first thing you thought of was how he used to buy you a drink now and again. That’d be the first thing I’d think of too - apart from the obvious, of course.” Sitting back in his chair, he made a mime in front of his torso as if handling a large longbow. I didn’t get it until he puffed out his cheeks.
Vice-Dean Edwin Secombe, or “Ned” as he liked to be called, had always seemed to match Dean Keaton’s dramatic attitude for work with his grand attitude for life outside of work. As a renowned Professor of philosophy and once-lecturer in the Classics, it was rumoured by some of the more imaginative students that he was the incarnation of the God Bacchus. In his office he was cool and mellow, possessing a near-Zen Buddhist calm; but at parties, campus events, dances - well, pretty much anywhere music and alcohol could be found - he took on the form of a laughing, singing giant, always able to materialise food out of one hand and a beverage into the other.
‘Giant’ might have been the right term for him, too - to put it politely, he could have made two of me, and not by cutting me in half. Freshmen nicknames for him were “The Boulder”, or “The Kingpin” amongst the nerdier circles (I never got that one). Rumours would fly around of the titanic lunches that his secretary would shepherd into the depths of his office each day, never to be seen again.
However, in spite of his girth and the lust for life that seemingly came from and added to it, his pudgy hands never once left a full glass or piled-up plate to find themselves pawing a beautiful young freshman’s waist. I can tell you that for a fact, no matter what hearsay might have gone around between staff and students. As lustful as he might have been at a bar or a table, his other desires stayed firmly at home. How do I know? Well...let’s get back to my story.
“Now, I’m not a foolish man,” the Dean was saying. “I know that it takes more than brains and qualifications to take Ned’s place. He was the Yang to my Yin, the rich cheese to my dusty chalk. I got to be Dean by being a professional; he got to be Vice-Dean by being liked and always buying beers. Why, I might not be married if he hadn’t recommended me the perfect Indian restaurant in the city to propose to Phillipa in. And there’s my problem with you.”
He stood up in his desk, empathising his 6’4”, lean-yet-muscly frame. For a man in his late fifties, he was in very good shape. I cringed back, involuntarily.
“You’re never at a party unless you’re invited, and you drink like you were raised by the local chapter of the A.A. You’re a damn good academic, but we already have one of those in the head office. That’s me. I need to know, m’boy, that you can fill his shoes, so to speak. I’m not sure you’re as...big a man as Ned was, or whether you even could be.”
“What would you have me do, Ollie?” I asked, trying not to let the small worry in the back of my head make it fully into my brain. “I have at least one way of proving my worth”, I said, reaching for the binder in which sat my dissertation.
“Save it. I have another way. And mine’s...bigger.” I stared at him quizzically. “As in, it’s big of me. Hmph, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain it to you...but never mind, perhaps it was a tad too esoteric. You were eyeing that woman in the pink bathing suit, weren’t you?”
I sat up straight. I swear, sometimes it seemed like he was trying to make his entire life one long comedic drama. Taking his bait, I breathed out and grinned, caught. “When we went by the pool? Yeah. She wasn’t that bad.”
This of course was a gross understatement. That girl was *fiery*, a vision in pink and flower-patterns, her long black curly hair spilling over her lithe frame and her cute little buns forming a neat upside-down heart as she cooled down on the edge of the pool. What I’d have given to -
“Her name’s Vanessa Secombe. His daughter.”
I was glad I’d said no to that coffee. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear his booming laugh when I spat it onto my lap. “Whuh - *her* But she’s - ”
“Pick your next word carefully,” he said, punctuating this remark with a single raised finger. “He was a great friend of mine and I will not have anyone speak ill of him, dead or no.”
“...Modestly endowed,” I said. “She doesn’t resemble him at all.”
“All the better for her. She’s kept it quiet that she’s his daughter so no-one would think she’s getting extra credit from Daddy. How one could get credit as a Psych Major from a Classics professor we’ll never know, but then people would have talked anyway. She graduates with the others in a week’s time. I want you to get to know her.”

“How so?” I asked, as he quickly circled his desk.
“Talk to her, buy her lunch. Ask her what kind of a man her father was in the one place you didn’t know him - outside of the office. You’ll have the summer break. Don’t think of this as part of the interview. The job is yours, it’s right for you, I’ve no doubt about it. But, well...I want to know that you’re right for the job.”
He opened the door, pointing with all the gravity of the Spirit of Christmas Future in the direction of the gym. “Who knows, Jeff. You and she might end up as sweethearts,” he said, elbowing me in the ribs as I left.
“I’ll try to be as professional as possible, Ollie,” I smiled back as I strode purposefully away. Who was I kidding, though? The job I’d been hungering after since starting work as a Professor was mine for the asking, and all I had to do was make friends with a beautiful girl! That is, if I could pluck up the courage.
I stopped for a second in the hallway, watching assorted smiling young people mill about from class to cafeteria and back. Ollie was right, I was a bit uptight...the wildness of my own college days had been reigned in as soon as I faced the Big Bad Outside World, and I’d not felt the need to unwind with anything greater than a good book and a glass of wine at the end of the day in years. What was I going to learn from this daughter of Bacchus? How could I, a dry and dusty fossil of a man, even attempt to ask her to have lunch with me?
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“You know what’s funny?”, I said absent-mindedly.
“No, but...you’re going to...tell me,” replied Nessa. We’d just finished our third session of immaculate, frenzied love-making for the evening and she was busy catching her breath.
“When Ollie first told me to go talk to you, that time,” I said, grinning down at her, “I said I was going to be as professional as possible.” I kissed the tip of her nose, revelling in the immensely cute way it instinctively wriggled when touched. Interrupting her reply with another kiss, full on the lips, that lasted far longer than I’d anticipated, I moved down to her chin, then her neck, and kept moving over her supple, sculpted athletic body.
“Oh?”, she replied, partly because I’d given her right nipple a quick pinch. “So your idea of professional is to end your first evening with a girl with your tongue down her throat and both hands on her backside?”
“What, like this?” I said, pinching her in the aforementioned area, eliciting a tiny squeal that told me I was going to get it just as soon as she’d finished letting me kiss down her smooth, waspish waist down to the beautiful area beneath.
This day, our six-month anniversary, had gone like a dream, just as my new position of Vice-Dean had. My darling Nessa, it turned out, was just as much possessed of cheer as her departed father, perhaps more so. After all, Ned required an evening of music and a wallet-crushing amount of beers to awaken the party spirit in other people.
As it had turned out after that fateful first lunch, with Nessa it took just a smirk...a wink...the touch of fingertip upon fingertip...to turn an otherwise dried-up man into a wild beast. That first night with her on the town might have been the best I’d ever had; we ended up so drunk we were daring each other to capture flags from atop government buildings or bathe naked in a fountain together.
Now, I was Vice-Dean, Nessa was in the middle of her Doctorate, and we were happier than either of us could ever remember being. Deliriously so, in fact. Though, of course, that happiness could not last.
Nessa’s studies were taking her across the country to participate as an intern in a forensic psychologist’s lab in NY, there to add to her studies - an internship that would last her five months, and one that began in the next week. Maybe that’s why that night of vodka-fuelled passion seemed so particularly special; or because it was our six-month anniversary, as I mentioned before.
As we bathed in the warm afterglow from our fifth session - futilely contemplating the idea of calling it a night - she suddenly cuddled up to me in a position which I knew instinctively meant that she wanted to convince me to do something that I might not want to. “Sweeeetyyyyy?” she stage-whispered.
“Mm?” I replied, wrapping my arm around her waist and preparing a breath in case I needed to sigh theatrically.
“You know how Mom’s coming to visit tomorrow?”

Ah yes, the widow Secombe, though Nessa had told me she preferred to be called Mrs Lu, her maiden name, and always had been. I knew little of her - she had gone to spend time with her family back in Hong Kong since her husband’s passing - save that Nessa didn’t speak about her very often. Not in a resentful or angry way, just...she never seemed to think the subject worth speaking about at length. This made Mrs Lu something of a mystery, and I was surprised that she’d been brought up so suddenly.
“Yeah? Why, do you want to cancel it? You never talk about her.”
“I know, I know...you’ll see why. I don’t want to cancel, I wanted to warn you...she’s not going back to Hongkers. She’s back for good, and she’ll probably visit. A lot.”
I failed to see the problem. “Which means...”
“Which means you’ll have to handle her while I’m away, and I just want you to know what you’re in for. You remember my Dad, right?”
“Like he was my long-lost, awesome uncle.”
“He was...well, he was a lot more uptight when he was younger. Mom, she just has this...influence on people. It’s hard to describe. I mean, for instance -” She cuddled up to me tightly, pressing her wriggly little body against my washboard abs. (I work out, why not? Just because I’m an academic doesn’t mean I don’t have time to get to the gym.) “I didn’t always look like this, you know?”
“No, I don’t.” She’d never shown me pictures of herself when she was younger, which I figured was her business. “Why, what was so - ”
“Never mind, never mind. Just...promise me you’ll show some restraint while she’s around, OK? Don’t let her tempt you.”
My mind was racing. I was expecting the blood-and-thunder Mother-in-Law stereotype of old, which so many of my males friends had attested as a real danger, but this was making her sound like a wild nymphomaniac! “Alright...I guess I can be more...conservative?”
“Promise?” She looked up at me. This seemed really important to me.
“Promise.”
“Good. Now...enough talk about the old me. Why don’t you show how much you appreciate the me of the here-and-now?” she grinned, letting her left hand travel south from my chest.
“You minx,” I replied, and stuck my tongue in her ear. A cat couldn’t have shrieked as loud.
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Then came the day I got introduced to Mrs. Lu.
Nessa had gone to spend an hour or two helping her unpack at her house before coming back to our apartment. I spent the evening after work making the place presentable, tidying up and laying out the best dishes on the table. I noticed Nessa had done nothing for dinner except put on a tomato soup in one of those blender-type machines that chops the ingredients and cooks the soup afterwards. Cousinargs or something, I don’t know.
When I looked at the stove, I found a quickly-scribbled note - “No need!”
What could *that* mean, I wondered? In any case, I decided not to prepare anything else. Evidently Mrs. Lu was of a more frugal nature.
I’d just changed into my most inoffensive, laid-back outfit, poured the soup into a beautiful dish and poured myself a glass of wine when I heard the latch unlock and some...heavy footsteps.
“Ah, you must be Jeffrey!”, boomed an impressive voice from the hall, with a hint of Bostonian accent to it.
I saw now why Nessa didn’t often speak of her mother. She...didn’t have the words.
Many had called Ned Secombe a God born in human flesh, as I mentioned. Had they met Mrs Lu-Secombe, as she might once have been called, they’d have perhaps considered that he was married to a God incarnate. She *radiated*, dammit, with a kind of crackling inner light. Her cheery smile, her bubbly voice, the spring in her step - one could not help but like her as soon as see her.
As for that spring, well...it wasn’t just in her step. She bounced, dear reader. Everywhere. I’ve heard of women with her figure referred to as having an “Apple” shape, but hers was more like a ball, smooth and round and bouncing everywhere. Her magnificent belly, jutting forward within her tight summer dress, was framed by a bosom larger than Nessa’s head. Her many-chins and padded cheeks added to the neverending cheerful expression her face sported, and the thickness of her upper arms served as an extra pair of cushions as she squeezed me powerfully to her in one of the most satisfactory hugs I’ve ever received. Even her hair, long black curls that she must surely have gifted her daughter with, was arrayed in a mass of curls down to her shoulders that bounced as ably as any other part of her inspiring anatomy. She was...astounding.
“My little Nessie has told me all about you. I was worried you were only after her to get her Dad’s old job, but you look just her type, mm?” Her titanic squeeze increased, pushing me embarrassingly closer to that capacious bosom. “Skinny as a rail.”
I’d never felt this way about a woman before...never been so awed by one. I’d seen my share of fat women, of course, but none of them with such...divinity. And certainly none of them were the adoring mother of my girlfriend of the time, of course. Surely this beautiful behemoth, as attractive as she was (though I was loath to admit it) wasn’t the sex maniac Nessa had hinted at? She seemed so maternal. As if she were born to be a mother.
Nessa strode in behind Mrs. Lu as I was released, panting slightly and muttering something about how nice it was to finally meet her. It might as well not have been Nessa, though - one could hardly tell through the volume of large, foil-covered plates hefted in front of her face.
“What...what’s this?” I half-stammered, sipping at my wine surreptitiously while handing her a glass.
“Ah, thank you dear. Well, I couldn’t stop by without giving you a good feeding, now could I?” she beamed. “Seeing what a skinny minnie my poor only daughter’s getting - “
“Mom”, snapped an unmistakeable (and unmistakably irritated) voice from behind the tower of plates. “Less talk about my figure, please. Little help, Jeff?”
I rushed to take some of the weight out of Vanessa’s arms.
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Such a meal. I have not the time to tell you of all of the treats she laid before us that evening, with flavours of every continent and leftovers that could have stocked our larder each day for the next year. Roast duck in the classical orange sauce, Moroccan lamb with couscous, Mongolian hotpot...it seemed impossible that she could have whipped this all up in the day since she’d returned from Hong Kong, but I never mentioned it. I was too swollen with gratitude that she’d laid it on for us. Or, more accurately, swollen with the food. My normally slim stomach puffed out well over the modest belt-line I was accustomed to.
Mrs. Lu turned out to be twice the personality that I could remember Ned “Boulder” Secombe being. Before she’d even met her husband, she’d spent half of her childhood with one parent in Boston and the other with another in “Hongkers” (as she and her daughter often termed Hong Kong, for reasons beyond my imagination). She’s travelled around the world, twice, as an English teacher, volunteered as an aid worker in Africa and spent five years as a comic stage actress touring around Europe. Then she’d found Ned (at a wine-and-cheese dinner, of course), and “fixed him”.
“How so?” I asked, ignoring the furtive shushing gestures and sharp kicks from Nessa.
“Oh, before he met me he looked just like you, Jeffrey...the poor man,” she sighed wistfully into her wine glass, taking a hearty gulp. “Without me, he’d have barely *tasted* his life before it got taken away from him. I put some meat on his bones...the way you ought to be doing, girly”, she winked at Nessa as if hinting at an old family secret. My usually mellow-mannered girlfriend groaned and quickly tried to change the subject.
When she’d said her charming goodbyes (leaving us with a whole vanilla-and-chocolate layer cake to divide between us when stomachs were emptier) and left to take the bus home, Nessa thumped me on the arm as soon as the door closed.
“What was that for?” I half-joked. “I made a good impression, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t have to encourage her! This is what I was talking about!”, she snapped, not placated in the least. I tried to hold her shoulders but she shrugged me away, going back to the kitchen to clean up.
“Nessa...what exactly is your problem with your mother?” I asked gently from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got to talk about it sooner or later.”
“I know, it’s just...” she sighed. “She’s got this obsession with food. I think in her head, eating a lot means living a better life.”
“So? It seems to be working out for her.”
“It doesn’t work out for everyone!”, she said, angrily throwing a plate into the sink. “You have no idea what it was like for me as a kid...I was pudgy from the day I was born and I never grew out of it.”
She was shaking a little, and I hugged her from behind. “You never told me about this, baby...”
“I was scared you’d laugh at me the way everyone else did. All the kids...they used to call me Pudge, and Lardo, and, and...” she was crying a little. “They’d sing ‘This Little Piggy’ when my parents came to pick me up. That’s why I told Dad not to let anyone know I was his. I didn’t want everyone to think of me the way I used to be. The big fat idiot.”
“But you’re not - ”
“It’s always been hanging over me. Back when I started doing Psych, any time anyone told me they had Mommy issues, I’d just tell them ‘Mine’s Bigger’.” She smiled, sadly. “Honestly, Jeff, would you have taken one look at me if I was anything like my Mom?”
“Her specifically?” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“What?!”
“I mean, uh, she’s such a nice person, I don’t think I’d judge, physical, um - ” I backtracked. This was a more difficult subject to talk about than I’d thought.
Her face took on an expression of curiosity mixed with disgust. “Don’t tell me you’re turned on by her.”
“Not at all!” I lied furtively. “No, it’s just...she’s like your father. All warm and friendly. You can’t help but like her. I think that’s where you got it from.”
She couldn’t help but smile at that, but still sighed and laid her head on my shoulder. “That’s not all I got from her...you don’t want to know what I looked like as a teen. I was a blimp. It took forever to get where I am now.”
“Babe, you know I’d love you whatever you look like,” I said, kissing her forehead tenderly. That was most certainly not a lie, and she knew it.
“Yeah, just...I wouldn’t love me, if I were bigger, you know? Being fat is gross. It might have worked for Mom and Dad, but not for me and you.” She looked up. “Right? You’re not going to get fat, right?”
“Okay, okay,” I laughed, not taking her worry seriously. “You know me, Mister Lifetime Gym Membership. I’ve always watched my figure.”
“You better. And you better keep your promise.” She poked me right in the navel. “Because today’s little feast? That was just the beginning. She’s going to come back and try it again and again, and you’d better hold out and not ask for seconds or she’ll get to you the way she gets to everyone.” I looked at her, concerned. “I know how it sounds. I love her to pieces, really, but I’ve seen her get everyone fat. Me, my friends, my co-workers...even with Dad it seemed like she kept daring him to get bigger. Maybe if he hadn’t taken that dare...”
She let that question hang in the air. Which was odd, as I’d been assured that Ned’s cardiac arrest was entirely stress-related. Big as he’d been, he’d always been a one for exercise as well.
“I understand, sweetness. I won’t let her get to me. You’ll come back and this tummy of mine...” I pressed her tightly to me - “Will be just as flat as yours.”
“Good. I’m glad. Now do the dishes, will ya? *Walking Dead* is on in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes ma’am.”
