Turn 14 of 21
Weigh herself and see where it has taken her now. Order massive Saturday brunch for both of them. Lexi starting burping, farting and pissing with abandon and stops wearing clothes. The shit stains accumulate from you. Your work continues to improve. A month from now, you have another promotion. Both you and Lexi are permanently high and drunk and burp, fart, piss and shit wherever.
Lena steps on the scale and the number blinks up at her: 240. She runs a hand across the vast curve of her belly, feeling the warmth pulse beneath the skin, and grins. Ninety-five pounds in three weeks. Her body is a landscape now — the belly a broad, heavy dome that hangs over her thighs when she sits and sways when she walks, the breasts enormous and pendulous, the ass wide enough to overflow two couch cushions. She catches herself in the bathroom mirror and barely recognizes the woman there — the greasy matted ropes of red hair, the thick coarse body hair across every surface, the food stains and the dried sweat and the yellow residue on her inner thighs. She looks feral. She looks free.
She orders brunch for two — a mountain of pancakes and waffles and eggs and bacon and sausage and hash browns and biscuits and gravy, plus a case of mimosas that she substitutes with straight champagne and orange juice separately because the mixing feels like too much effort. The delivery driver leaves it at the door without knocking. Lena carries it to the couch in three trips, her belly pressed against the table edge, her thighs rubbing with each step. Lexi is already on the couch, naked now — she stopped wearing clothes on Thursday, the same day she stopped shaving and stopped holding her farts in. She is 150 pounds of soft, new flesh, her belly a gentle round curve above her panties, her breasts fuller, her thighs touching, body hair dark and visible under her arms and on her legs. She reaches for a plate of pancakes before Lena has even set the bags down.
They eat. The apartment fills with the smell of maple syrup and grease and champagne and sweat and the deeper sour note underneath that neither of them notices anymore. Halfway through the second plate Lexi leans back and a long, resonant belch rolls out of her — deep and wet and entirely unapologetic — and she follows it with a low, rumbling fart that vibrates through the cushion. She looks at Lena and her face splits into a grin that Lena has never seen on her mother before, wide and reckless and young.
"God, that feels good," Lexi says. She reaches for more bacon.
The shit stains multiply. Lena doesn't make it to the bathroom on Sunday morning — she wakes up on the couch with her belly full and heavy and the pressure low and urgent and she doesn't even try to stand. She just lets go where she is, the warm mess spreading beneath her, and the relief and the shamelessness of it flood through her like a drug. She doesn't clean up. She doesn't move. She reaches for a beer instead. By the end of the weekend the couch cushions are streaked with brown smears and the apartment smells like a barn and neither woman cares. Lexi pisses herself on Monday afternoon without pausing the show she's watching, the warm flood pooling beneath her on the leather, and she laughs and eats another handful of chips.
The month passes in a warm, heavy blur. Lena works from the couch — naked, high, drunk, her belly resting on her laptop, her fingers greasy on the keyboard. Her numbers are extraordinary. She closes every account her team brings her. Her emails are models of clarity. She burps during a presentation on a Tuesday and says "excuse me" in a voice so sultry it sounds like a joke and three people on the call laugh and nobody reports it. She farts during a one-on-one with her director on a Thursday and he doesn't even pause. The work world has bent around her like the wish is reshaping reality itself to accommodate what she is becoming.
The promotion email arrives on a Friday four weeks later. Lead Strategy Manager, with a twenty percent salary increase and a team of eight. She reads it on the couch, naked, surrounded by the wreckage of another week — containers and cans and stains and the sour-sweet smell of two bodies living without restraint. Lexi is beside her, 175 pounds now, her belly round and soft and resting on her thighs, her breasts heavy, her ass wider than the cushion, body hair thick and dark and untrimmed. They are both high. They are both drunk. They are both full. Lena reads the email aloud and Lexi belches in celebration and Lena farts in response and they laugh until the couch shakes.
The apartment is no longer an apartment. It is a habitat — a warm, sour, food-stained habitat where two women have stopped performing and started existing, and the wish hums through both of them like a shared heartbeat, and the warmth pulses in their bellies and their breasts and their thighs, and the voice that Lena used to hear only in her own mind now speaks in two voices, and both of them say: more. Always more.