Turn 9 of 21

wake up Saturday and take stock of the mess and the body. She is impressed and turned on. Afterwards, try to stand and move to see what 200 pounds feels like in motion. Start twerking. After that, continue to get high, drunk and stuff herself and repeat the process for the following week, both at and outside work. Continue farting burping and peeing where ever. Get raise at end of next week.

Lena wakes to a sound she can't place — a dripping, maybe the kitchen faucet she never fixed — and the first thing she registers is the smell. Her apartment reeks. Old food and stale beer and sweat and something sharper underneath, the ammonia note of urine dried into the couch cushions. She lies still and feels her body spread across the wet leather, heavy and warm, her belly rising with each breath like a hill under a blanket. She runs her hands down her sides and the terrain is vast — wider than she could have imagined two weeks ago, the soft give of her hips, the broad shelf of her ass pressed flat beneath her, the heavy hang of her breasts sliding to either side as she shifts. Two hundred pounds. She says it out loud to the empty room, testing the weight of the number, and a grin spreads across her face.

Getting upright is an event. She rocks forward and her belly presses against her thighs and the momentum almost carries her but not quite, so she tries again, planting her hands on the couch arms and heaving until she is standing, swaying, breath coming faster than it should from the effort of lifting herself. The room shifts around her. She feels tall and wide simultaneously, her center of gravity pulled forward by the round weight of her gut, her thighs pressed together from hip to knee. She takes a step and the floor creaks under her and her ass bounces with the impact, each cheek rippling, and she almost laughs because she can feel every part of herself moving — the jiggle of her breasts, the sway of her belly, the way her thighs rub with a soft, warm friction. She takes another step and then another and then the music in her head takes over and she bends forward, hands on her knees, and shakes her ass toward the mirror.

The reflection is absurd and magnificent. Her ass is enormous — two broad, dimpled cheeks clapping together with each shake, the motion sending ripples up her back and down her thighs. She twerks harder and the couch rattles and a beer can falls off the armrest and clatters to the floor and she's laughing, breathless, her belly hanging between her thighs, sweat already prickling across her forehead from the effort. She stops and catches her breath and looks at herself in the mirror — flushed, greasy, enormous, happy — and the warm voice says: More. Always more.

The week that follows is a continuation of everything, amplified. She orders breakfast deliveries at seven AM and eats them during standup meetings, the camera angled up past her bare shoulders. She smokes before every call and drinks through the afternoon and her work — somehow, impossibly — gets better. Her reports are sharper. Her emails are cleaner. She closes a client account on Tuesday that her team has been chasing for three months, and her director sends a message that says simply: Impressive work. She reads it while eating a plate of nachos on the couch, belches wet and long into the silence, and feels the arousal pulse through her again. On Wednesday she doesn't bother going to the bathroom during a long afternoon block — she just lets go where she sits, the warm flood spreading beneath her, and the relief and the shamelessness of it make her squeeze her thighs together and breathe hard. On Thursday she farts during a video presentation and watches two colleagues' faces freeze on screen and says "excuse me" in a voice so sultry she almost breaks character laughing.

Friday arrives and she weighs herself: 207. She stares at the number and runs a hand across her belly, feeling the new softness, the way it hangs lower now, heavy and round. Her phone buzzes. An email from HR with her director CC'd. She opens it expecting a reprimand, a complaint, something about the sounds or the smell or the fact that she hasn't been on camera in proper work attire in a week. Instead it says: effective next pay period, a merit-based increase of eight percent, in recognition of outstanding Q3 performance. She reads it twice. Then she orders a celebratory pizza and a six-pack and a pre-roll and sinks into the couch — into the mess, into the smell, into the warm, expanding body that is finally, finally hers — and the warm voice whispers: This is what comfort looks like. Keep going.