Turn 100 of 233

He leaves in the morning, I consider getting the rest of my body below the neck, except for my hands and feet, with the same tribal design. My weight is 365 now. Masturbate to it

Aleki leaves at six. She hears him moving in the early light — the quiet sounds of a large man gathering himself, the blanket folded, the door pulled shut with the careful weight of someone who knows how to close doors quietly. She doesn't open her eyes. The concrete is warm where he was and cooling where he wasn't and she lies in the difference for ten minutes before she stands and stretches and the body is three hundred and thirty-five pounds in the morning light.

No. She steps on the scale. The number is different now. Three hundred and sixty-five. The jump is real — ten pounds in a week, the weight coming faster, the body climbing past every plateau she tracked on the spreadsheet. She stares at the number and the number stares back and the thought that moves through her is not alarm. Not surprise. The thought is: *more*. She opens the spreadsheet and adds the line: 365 lbs, 19 miles, feet held, press 340. The correlation holds. The line goes up.

She sits on the balcony edge and looks down at her body. Both legs are done — ankle to hip, tribal black sharp and complete, the ink settled into the skin like it grew there. She traces the line where the tattoo ends at her hip and the untouched skin begins and the transition is abrupt. Two tattooed legs rising into an untattooed torso. It looks incomplete. It looks like a house with the framing done and the drywall not started. She follows the hip line up — across the belly, the soft heavy belly with the steel piercing catching the light, the skin smooth and bare. Up the chest, the breasts full and heavy, the nipple barbells glinting. The shoulders. The arms — the left arm done from shoulder to wrist, the right arm done the same. The back she can't see but can feel. The neck. She pictures it. The tribal black running from her ankles to her throat, covering every inch of skin below the jaw, following the muscle and the fat and the bone the way Jess followed the legs — the same language, the same principle, ink that maps the body's architecture. Everything below the neck except her hands and her feet. The hands she needs to feel with — the calluses, the texture of wood and concrete and steel. The feet she needs to run on — the calluses, the ground, the contact. Everything else is canvas.

The scale said three hundred and sixty-five. The body is bigger. The body is still growing. The softness is thicker on her belly and her hips and her thighs and the muscle is denser beneath it and the two layers — fat and muscle — are building together the way they build on an offensive lineman and the body is becoming the architecture she studied on tape. She stands in front of the barbell rack and looks down at herself and imagines the tribal black covering everything — the belly wrapped in it, the chest, the back, the arms already done continuing across the shoulders and down the spine, the lines spiraling and branching and thickening where the muscle is thick and thinning where the bone is close to the surface. A full body suit. Below the neck. Everything mapped. Everything claimed.

She lies on the balcony floor and the concrete is warm and the sun is up and the baseline spikes — not the gradual hum but the sharp spike, the one that comes when the body sees what it's becoming and wants it. Her hand moves down across the belly — three hundred and sixty-five pounds of soft heavy warm — and the tribal ink is sharp on both legs and her fingers follow the ink line at the hip where the tattoo ends and the bare skin begins and she imagines the line continuing. Up. Across. Everywhere. Her hand moves lower and the baseline crests and the orgasm is long and deep and the body shakes on the concrete and the sun is warm and the city hums below and she lies there and breathes and the thought is clear and fully hers: *all of it.*