Turn 20 of 233

Head home and eat the biggest dinner I can put together. Finish the ouse tomorrow

Lena walks home in the late orange light, barefoot on the warm pavement, her tank top slung over one shoulder and her shorts riding low on her hips. The sweat has dried to a tight glaze across her belly and breasts and the evening air cools the top of her skin while the heat underneath stays banked, slow and steady, like embers. Her feet find the sidewalk without flinching — the calluses take the gravel, the glass-smooth patches, the cracked concrete where tree roots have pushed through, and she doesn't adjust her stride for any of it. She is 185 pounds and six feet three inches and she can feel every pound working for her, the weight of her thighs driving each step, the heft of her belly shifting with the rhythm of her walk, her breasts heavy and full and swaying slightly with the pace. She smells like sawdust and dried sweat and beer and herself, a deep musk that has been building for days, and she breathes it in and doesn't want it gone.

She stops at the grocery store two blocks from her apartment and fills a cart without a list. Two whole chickens. A bag of Yukon Gold potatoes. A pound of butter. Heavy cream. A block of Parmesan. A loaf of sourdough the size of her forearm. Two bags of frozen broccoli with cheese sauce. A pint of ice cream — the dense kind, chocolate peanut butter, that she used to look at and never buy. A six-pack of beer. A jar of pickles. A package of bacon. She walks through the store barefoot and shirtless, the tank top still over her shoulder, her belly leading the way, and the cashier — a teenager with a name tag that says JARED — scans everything without looking up and says have a nice night in the flat voice of someone counting the minutes to the end of his shift.

She roasts both chickens with butter and rosemary and garlic, the skin crackling and golden, the fat rendering into the pan and sizzling. She mashes the potatoes with cream and half a stick of butter and the Parmesan, beats them until they're smooth and dense and gleaming. She fries the bacon crisp and crumbles it into the potatoes. She steams the broccoli with cheese sauce and tears the sourdough open and butters it thick. She eats standing at the counter, naked, pulling meat off the chicken bones with her fingers, the juice running down her wrists and forearms, the skin so crisp it shatters between her teeth. She eats the potatoes in enormous spoonfuls, the cheese pulling in long strings, the bacon salty and sharp. She eats the broccoli. She eats half the sourdough, tearing it in chunks and dragging them through the chicken fat pooled in the roasting pan. She eats until her belly is round and tight and heavy, the skin stretched taut, and then she opens the ice cream and eats a third of the pint standing with the freezer door open, the cold air washing over her sweat-dried skin, and the contrast between the cold on her surface and the warmth deep in her belly makes her close her eyes.

She doesn't clean up. She leaves the bones on the counter and the pans on the stove and the ice cream on the counter melting. She goes to the living room and drops to the floor and works her body — push-ups, squats, lunges, plank holds, the cast-iron deadlifts she invented last weekend — and the fullness of her belly makes every movement heavier, the weight shifting inside her, and the burn in her muscles is sharp and immediate and perfect. She does push-ups until her arms give out and then does three more. She farts during a squat and grunts through it and keeps going. She finishes, lies on the floor with her arms spread and her belly rising and falling, and the arousal comes fast and warm and she doesn't wait — her hands move over the sweat and the chicken grease and the ice cream residue on her skin, over the full curve of her belly and the heaviness of her breasts and the solid muscle of her thighs, and she comes hard and slow and doesn't move for a long time after.

The alarm is her body again at five, pulling her out of bed with the same urgent readiness. She eats the rest of the potatoes cold from the pan and a chicken leg stripped of meat and two pieces of toast with peanut butter and drinks a glass of whole milk and belches so deep it vibrates the dishes in the drying rack. She pulls on the same tank top and the same shorts — both of them stiff with days of accumulated sweat and dirt and food — and walks to the site with the sun barely up, her feet dark on the cool sidewalk, her belly full and heavy and warm. The crew is already there. Walt looks at her and grunts the grunt that means good, you're here. Marco is talking about something. The west wall is waiting.

They work through the morning and into the afternoon, and the heat is back but not as brutal — a dry, honest heat that Lena's body moves through like it belongs there. She hauls lumber and drives nails and holds plywood while Frank measures and calls out numbers, and her body is a machine running on chicken fat and potatoes and muscle memory, the softness of her belly swaying with each movement, the hardness beneath it firing on every stroke. They frame the west wall, square it, sheet it, and by three o'clock the second story is closed in. Walt walks the perimeter with a level and a tape measure and comes back and looks at the crew — all of them shirtless and drenched and dusty, every one of them — and says one word.

"Good." He closes his tape measure with a snap.

"Inspector comes Thursday. We're ready." Frank nods. Ray actually smiles. Daryl and Ray share a look that contains an entire conversation. Tuki opens the cooler. Marco starts talking about the wild card race. And Lena sits on the tailgate with her hammer in her hand and her bare feet dangling and her huge, filthy, sunlit body aching in every muscle, and the house stands behind her — two stories, four walls, a real thing in the world that she helped build — and the feeling that fills her is so large and simple it doesn't need a name.