Turn 34 of 233

Keep pushing the workouts — try running barefoot on the street at dawn. As a result, I eat even more aggressively to fuel the heavier work. I also masturbate to the results of my lifestyle more often

Saturday morning Lena wakes at four-thirty. The apartment is dark and the balcony door is still open and the air coming in is cool against her bare skin. She lies on the floor for a minute, feeling the hardwood under her shoulder blades, the weight of her belly settling as she breathes, the heaviness of her body in the still air. Then she rolls to her feet and walks out the front door and down the stairs and steps onto the sidewalk barefoot and starts running.

The concrete is cold and gritty under her callused soles. The first block is awkward — her belly bounces heavy with each stride, her breasts shift and sway, her thighs slap together on the downbeat, and the impact travels up through her bare feet into her ankles and knees and hips in a way that running shoes were always designed to absorb. She feels all of it. The second block the rhythm finds itself. Her feet land on the balls and her toes grip the pavement and her stride shortens and her body figures out its own geometry — the wide stance, the heavy core, the low center of gravity that two hundred pounds gives her. She runs east on the empty street in the gray dawn light, her belly swaying, her arms pumping, her breath coming deep and ragged, and the sensation is raw and animal and good.

She runs a mile. Maybe a mile and a half. By the time she stops her feet are dirty and the skin on her soles is warm from the friction and her lungs are burning and her legs are shaking and she walks the last three blocks home with her hands on her hips, breathing hard, sweat running down the channel between her breasts and pooling in the fold beneath her belly. She is grinning. The endorphins hit her at the front door like a wave and she leans against the frame and laughs — a deep, belly-shaking laugh that echoes in the stairwell.

The hunger arrives twenty minutes later. It arrives the way a storm arrives — sudden, total, impossible to argue with. Lena stands at the stove naked and cooks eight eggs in butter and eats them with a half loaf of bread torn into chunks and a jar of peanut butter and a quart of milk. Then she makes a second batch. Four more eggs, more bread, the peanut butter thick on her fingers. She eats standing at the counter with her belly pressed against the laminate, the food filling her in stages — the eggs first, then the bread expanding, then the milk settling heavy and cold on top of everything — and by the time she finishes her belly is tight and round and distended and she rests both hands on it and belches long and deep and feels the pressure release.

The workouts get longer. Sunday she runs a mile and a half and does three sets of everything on the balcony and eats a pound of pasta with meat sauce and two chicken thighs and a sleeve of Oreos and a half gallon of milk. Monday she runs two miles — the barefoot stride is smoother now, her soles adapting, the calluses thickening — and at the site she works harder than she has since the first week, carrying lumber double-time, swinging the hammer until her shoulder burns, hauling sheets up the ladder one after another until Walt tells her to slow down. She eats lunch like an animal — three sandwiches, two bags of chips, a protein shake Marco's wife made, a liter of chocolate milk — and finishes the afternoon and walks home and eats again and works out again and eats again.

The cycle builds its own momentum: run, work, eat, lift, eat, sleep. Her body is a furnace now, burning through calories the way the site burns through lumber, and the food she puts in is fuel and the fuel becomes muscle and fat and the muscle and fat become the thing she is building — herself. Tuesday night on the balcony she finishes her push-ups and lies on her back on the concrete with her belly rising and the sweat cooling on her skin and her hand drifts down her belly, over the round taut swell of it, past the tan line that is nearly gone, and she touches herself. Slow at first. The endorphins still in her blood, the food heavy in her belly, the warm night air on her bare skin. She thinks about her body — the weight of it, the strength of it, the way it fills space now, the way her bare feet grip the pavement and her belly sways when she runs and her arms can carry a sheet of plywood up a ladder and her thighs can squat until they burn. She thinks about the tan, the gold-brown of her skin, even and warm everywhere. She thinks about the calluses on her hands and the dirt on her feet and the sweat in the channel of her belly and the deep guttural satisfaction of eating until she's full and then eating more.

She comes quietly, her belly tightening, her breath held, her toes curling against the concrete. Then she lies there for a while, looking at the sky, her body heavy and warm and complete.

She does it again Wednesday morning before her run. And Thursday night after the site. And Friday at dawn on the living room floor with the balcony door open and the first light coming in and her hands moving over every part of herself — the belly, the breasts, the thighs, the tan, the muscle, the fat, the whole of what she has made of herself. The wish started this. But what she does now — the running and the eating and the working and the wanting — that is hers. That is the thing she chose. And she chooses it again every morning, barefoot on the pavement, her belly heavy and her stride long and the dawn light warm on her golden skin.