Turn 20 of 21

Speak to the wish again, ask if Lexi is part of it now. It says she is. As a result order food, weed and alcohol, enough for two women who have nowhere to stop.

Lena stands in the bathroom doorway with her mother's hand in hers and the word *no* still vibrating through her like a struck bell. The scale glows behind them — 520, 470 — and the blue television light paints their vast, unwashed bodies in the same cold wash. The apartment breathes around them, sour and warm, the couch a landscape of stains and compressed filth, the towers of cans and containers casting long shadows. She is not thinking about any of it. She is thinking about the warmth.

She closes her eyes again. The pulse is there — steady, golden, patient — and she speaks into it the way she spoke before, plain and direct, her voice low and thick in the bathroom dark.

"Is Lexi part of you now?" she asks. "Did you spread to her, or did she find you on her own?"

The warmth shifts. It moves through Lena's belly and her chest and then it leaps — she feels it cross the space between them like a spark between two wires, traveling through their joined hands, and Lexi inhales sharply beside her. The pulse finds Lexi's body and settles into it the way it settled into Lena's a year ago, humming through her belly, her breasts, her thighs, the deep folds and creases of 470 pounds of flesh that arrived at this apartment in a blazer and is now standing naked and matted and yellow-toothed in her daughter's bathroom doorway. The answer comes the same way the last one did — not words, not language, but a frequency that says *yes* and *she is mine* and *we are the same heartbeat now*.

Lena opens her eyes. Lexi is staring at her own hand, the one holding Lena's, and her expression is strange and open and full.

"I felt that," Lexi says. Her voice is barely above a whisper.

"I know," Lena says.

"It's in me. It's been in me for months. I just didn't know what it was."

Lena squeezes her hand. The warmth pulses through both of them — one frequency, one rhythm, one wish wearing two bodies — and for a moment the bathroom is gold and still and completely quiet.

"Good," Lena says. She turns and waddles toward the couch, her belly swaying, her thighs grinding together, each step a slow deliberate earthquake. She reaches for her phone on the coffee table, buried under a layer of grease-stained wrappers, and wipes the screen on her hip. She opens the delivery app.

She orders for two women who have nowhere to stop. Eight pizzas — four meat lovers, four supreme, extra cheese on all of them. Six orders of wings, three ranch, three blue cheese. Two trays of mac and cheese. A full rack of ribs. Three orders of garlic knots. A case of thirty IPAs and a case of champagne. Four pre-rolls, a tin of edibles, a quarter ounce of flower. Two liters of orange juice, a gallon of milk, three boxes of cereal. Two whole rotisserie chickens. A chocolate cake. Two orders of bread pudding. The total is staggering and she doesn't look at it. She hits confirm and the screen goes dark.

"That's enough for tonight," she says, and lowers herself onto the couch, the cushions groaning beneath her 520 pounds, the leather warm and slick beneath her thighs. Lexi follows, the couch dipping and shifting as 470 pounds of soft flesh settles beside her, their bellies touching, their hips pressing together, the warmth pulsing through the point of contact like a shared heartbeat.

The documentary is still playing — something about deep-sea vents and the creatures that live in the dark, blind and warm and fed by the earth itself. Lena watches it through half-closed eyes. The delivery will arrive in forty minutes and they will eat everything and drink everything and smoke everything and the stains will deepen and the cans will accumulate and the wish will hum through both of them, one pulse, one voice, saying what it always says, what it will always say, and Lena will agree, and Lexi will agree, and the night will pass the way every night passes now — warm and full and endless and home.