Turn 17 of 226

Wake up Saturday and take stock of the apartment — empty fridge, no clean clothes, no plans. Perfect. Then spend Saturday and Sunday leaning into the routine harder, more food, more exercise, more horniness, more of everything

Lena wakes with sunlight on her face and carpet fibers imprinted into her cheek. The living room floor has become her bed by default — four nights now, the same spot, the same impression worn into the beige pile where her body has pressed its shape. She lies still for a long moment, feeling the ache in her muscles from last night's workout, the pleasant soreness that sits deep in her thighs and chest like a low fire. Her belly rises with each breath, heavy and warm, and when she stretches her arms above her head her knuckles brush the wall. The apartment is quiet. Saturday. No office. No Diane. No Marcus report. No one watching.

She stands and the full height of her unfolds in the empty room. The apartment looks different this morning — not because anything has moved, but because she is seeing it as a list of absences. The fridge stands open and bare in the kitchen, the shelves clean except for a condiment bottle and a dried mustard stain. Her closet is a wire hanger skeleton, everything donated or discarded except the crop top and athletic shorts crumpled on the bathroom floor. The bathroom itself she avoids looking at directly — the mirror is there, and the scale, and the toothbrush she has not touched in four days. The trash can overflows with delivery containers. The sink has not been run. The apartment smells like Lena — sweat and food and the particular musk of a body that has been working and eating and sleeping and sweating without interruption, layered into every surface like varnish.

She should feel disgust. She knows this the way she knows the sky is blue — as information, received and filed, carrying no weight. The knowledge that a normal person would be horrified by this apartment, by her body in it, by the four days of accumulation, arrives and departs without engaging anything. The warmth pulses in her belly, patient and approving, and Lena pulls out her phone and orders food. Not one meal. Three. Breakfast from the diner on Fifth — eggs, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, a side of sausage, orange juice. She eats it on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet, bare skin on tile, grease running down her chin onto her chest. The warmth hums with each bite.

The day becomes rhythm. Lena exercises on the living room floor — push-ups until her arms give out, then squats until her legs do, then a circuit she invents on the spot that involves holding positions against the wall until her muscles shake and her breath comes in ragged gasps. She rests. She eats. She orders again around noon — a large pizza, breadsticks, a two-liter — and eats half of it lying on her stomach on the carpet with the box open beside her, cheese cooling on her fingers, her belly pressing into the floor with each breath. The warmth rewards her with pulses of pleasure that run from her stomach to her spine to places she does not bother naming. She touches herself on the living room floor with pizza grease still on her hands and does not clean up afterward.

Saturday bleeds into Sunday the way the warmth bleeds into everything — without seam, without announcement. She sleeps on the floor. She wakes. She orders food. She exercises harder than the day before — twenty push-ups now, her arms finding a new gear, the muscle beneath the fat responding as if it has been waiting for this demand her entire life. She eats again. She touches herself again. The routine has become liturgical, each repetition deepening the groove, each cycle pulling her further into a version of herself that feels less like a transformation and more like an arrival. By Sunday night her apartment is a wasteland of delivery containers and the air is thick with her smell and her body is sore and full and she lies on the living room floor with her belly rising and falling and the warmth pulsing steady beneath her palms, and she thinks: more. The word is not a demand. It is a recognition. More. The wish has no intention of stopping and neither does she.

Monday will come. Diane will be there. Marcus will want his report. The office will smell like coffee and toner and the particular anxiety of people who are pretending to be fine. Lena does not think about any of this. She thinks about breakfast.