Turn 15 of 21

Ask Lexi how she feels about what's happening to her body. She says she feels amazing and wishes for more. Priya attempts to sabotage you, but fails and gets caught. She is fired and she leaves the city, never to return. As celebration, you and Lexi spend the entire weekend, drunk, high and stuffing yourselves, along with worsening slob behavior.

Saturday afternoon light slants through the blinds and falls across the couch in warm stripes, catching the grease stains on the leather and the dust motes drifting above the coffee table. Lena shifts her weight and the cushion groans beneath her 240-pound frame, her belly spreading heavy across her thighs, and she turns to look at her mother. Lexi is sprawled beside her, naked, 175 pounds of soft new flesh, her round belly resting on her lap, her breasts heavy and wide, body hair thick and dark under her arms and across her legs. She is eating cold sesame noodles from a container with her fingers and there is sauce on her chin and she doesn't care.

"How do you feel?" Lena asks. The question is simple but she watches her mother's face with the focused clarity that only comes from being perpetually stoned.

"About all of this. About what's happening to your body."

Lexi sets the noodles down. She runs both hands across her belly — slow, deliberate, the way Lena touches her own — and her fingers sink into the soft flesh. She is quiet for a moment and the apartment hums around them with the sound of the fridge and the distant traffic and the low, constant warmth that Lena has stopped questioning.

"I spent eighteen years holding everything in," Lexi says. Her voice is loose and unguarded in a way Lena has never heard.

"Every meal measured. Every inch of skin shaved. Every burp swallowed. Every fart held until I was alone. I was so tired, Lena. I was so tired of being small and clean and quiet." She lifts her belly and lets it drop, watching the flesh ripple.

"I feel amazing. I want more. I want to keep going until I can't remember what it felt like to be hungry or cold or careful."

Lena feels the warmth flare in her own belly — recognition, the wish responding to something it recognizes — and she leans over and belches long and wet into the space between them and Lexi laughs and the sound fills the apartment.

The phone buzzes on Monday morning. Then again. Then a call from an unknown number that Lena ignores, and a voicemail that she listens to while eating a breakfast burrito naked on the couch. It's from her director. There's been a complaint filed with HR — an anonymous tip alleging inappropriate workplace conduct, unprofessional behavior during video calls, concerns about substance use on company time. The complaint includes screenshots from meetings: Lena's bare shoulders, the edge of a beer can visible at the bottom of the frame, the timestamp of a moment where she visibly burped during a client presentation. The tone is formal and pointed and the evidence is curated with a precision that feels personal.

Lena knows immediately. Priya. The lunch invitation she declined weeks ago — the one that felt calculated, that felt like someone trying to get a look at her. Priya, who sits three teams over and has been quietly watching Lena's transformation through the screen, collecting screenshots, building a case. The promotion to Lead Strategy Manager was supposed to be Priya's — Lena found out later that Priya had been positioning for it for two years, and Lena's rise through the ranks while visibly high and drunk and enormous was not part of anyone's plan.

Lena forwards the voicemail and the screenshots to her director with a one-line message: This is a coordinated attack from a colleague who was passed over for my position. I'm happy to discuss. She expects nothing. She expects a meeting, an investigation, the slow grinding machinery of corporate due process. Instead her director calls back within the hour and tells her that IT has already traced the anonymous complaint to Priya's workstation, that the screenshots were captured during meetings where Priya herself was a participant, that the timing of the complaint — filed the same day Lena's promotion was announced — constitutes retaliation under company policy. Priya is terminated by end of day. Her building access is revoked. HR sends a follow-up email that Lena reads while farting into the couch cushion and reaching for a beer.

By the weekend Priya is gone. Word travels through the office that she has left the city entirely — a transfer to a regional office that no one has heard of, or a resignation, or both. It doesn't matter. The thread that dangled for weeks has snapped and the space it occupied fills with warm silence.

Lena tells Lexi and they celebrate. The order is staggering — four pizzas, three buckets of fried chicken, two trays of mac and cheese, a case of beer, a case of champagne, edibles, pre-rolls, a bulk order of brownies. The delivery driver leaves it at the door in three bags and doesn't knock. They eat everything. Lena sits on the couch with her belly pressed against the coffee table and eats pizza with one hand and chicken with the other and drinks champagne straight from the bottle. Lexi is beside her, cross-legged, her round belly resting on her thighs, noodles hanging from her mouth, grease running down her wrists.

The slob behavior deepens like weather settling in. Lena belches and the sound rolls across the apartment and bounces off the kitchen tile and she feels it vibrate through her chest. Lexi farts — long, low, rumbling — and the smell rises and neither of them moves. Lena pisses herself without pausing, the warm flood spreading beneath her, soaking into the already-stained leather. Lexi follows a minute later, a warm stream pooling under her ass, and she sighs and reaches for another beer. The shit stains on the couch multiply — Lena doesn't try for the bathroom anymore, just shifts her weight and lets go and the mess joins the rest of the mess and the apartment smells like a place where no one has performed anything in a very long time.

They pass out on the couch together, vast and full and warm, and the wish hums through both of them and the voice says more, always more, and for the first time the voice sounds like both of them.