Turn 6 of 226

Call in sick to work and spend the day exploring the changes. My afterwork routine is essentially repeated

Lena's phone alarm goes off at six-fifteen, and for the first few seconds the sound is just noise in a dark room. She is on the living room floor, naked, her body stuck to the carpet with two days of dried sweat. Her belly sits heavy against her thighs when she curls upright, and the motion sends a cascade of sensations through her — the pull of her breasts, the drag of skin against skin where her thighs press together, the deep ache in muscles she pushed past their limits last night. She picks up the phone, opens her messages, and types three words to her supervisor: Food poisoning, out today. She does not wait for a reply.

The morning passes in a haze of inventory. She stands in the bathroom mirror and catalogues herself the way she would a stranger's body, except the stranger is her and the distance she used to feel is gone. Her belly is rounder than yesterday — she is sure of it, not guessing, because the overhang at her hips is deeper and the weight of it pulls forward in a way that shifts her posture. Her thighs touch from hip to knee now, and when she turns sideways the profile of her backside is genuinely large, each cheek full and heavy, the kind of body she would have stared at on someone else with a mixture of envy and confusion. She flexes her arms and watches the muscle swell under its padding, firm and solid, and the contrast — soft over hard, heavy over strong — makes her pulse quicken. She spends twenty minutes just touching herself. Not sexually, or not yet. Mapping the new terrain. The sensitivity of the skin where her belly creases. The way her breasts settle when she lets them hang. The thickening around her wrists, even, and the soft pads that have appeared along her collarbones.

By noon the hunger is a roar. She orders again — two sandwiches, a large fries, a milkshake, a side of mac and cheese — and eats on the living room floor cross-legged, her belly resting in her lap like something she is getting used to carrying. The food disappears fast and the fullness that follows is different from satisfaction. It is fuel. She can feel her body processing it, the warmth in her core intensifying, and she knows with a certainty that bypasses logic that the calories are becoming her. Becoming more of her.

The evening routine finds her like gravity finds water. She strips — she is already naked, but the gesture matters, the intentionality of it — and starts with push-ups. Her arms shake on the first rep and hold through fifteen. Squats until her thighs burn, and the burn is deeper than yesterday because there is more muscle to fire and more weight to move. She adds a new exercise: she holds the wall and does calf raises, and the pump in her legs makes her feel like a machine, a growing machine, and the thought makes her laugh out loud in the empty apartment. The workout ends when her body quits, not when she decides, and she lies on the carpet drenched in a third layer of sweat, three days unwashed, her skin slick and hot and alive.

The masturbation is not a decision. It is a continuation. Her hands find the landscape of her body and the arousal is already there, coiled in the exhaustion and the fullness and the rawness of her nerves. She grips her belly with both hands and feels its weight shift and jiggle, and the sensation runs straight through her. She works herself against the carpet, her hips grinding into the floor, and the orgasm is longer than the others, rolling through her in waves that match her heartbeat. Afterward she lies face-down, her face pressed into the carpet, her belly spread warm and heavy beneath her, and sleep arrives without announcement.

The apartment is dark. The empty food containers are multiplying on the counter. The air is thick with the smell of three days of unwashed skin and sweat and food and Lena, and somewhere underneath the exhaustion the warmth pulses steadily, patient and content, already preparing for tomorrow.