Turn 39 of 233

I go home and pass out on the floor after masturbating. Wake up and watch football. Be mesmerized by the O-line because they are the exact body type I want to be: tall, fat and muscular.

Lena drives home with the windows down, the morning air pulling the sweat off her skin in slow waves. Her belly is tight against the steering wheel, packed with pancakes and bacon and hash browns, and the warmth of it spreads through her core like something molten. She parks. Walks upstairs. Closes the door behind her and stands in the middle of the living room with the sun coming through the balcony door and the food heavy inside her and the endorphins still buzzing in her blood from the run. She doesn't make it to the bed or the couch or even a chair. She drops to the floor right there, her bare back on the hardwood, her belly rising like a golden dome in the warm light.

Her hand moves down her belly first, slow, feeling the taut fullness of it — the stretched skin, the weight of the food pressing outward, the way it sits round and hard and enormous above her hips. She runs her palm across the tan, even and golden, and down past the fading shorts line to the thick dark hair below her navel. Her other hand finds her breast — heavy and soft, the nipple hardened in the warm air — and she cups it and feels the weight of it settle in her palm. She thinks about the run. The four miles. The wall she hit and the wall she broke through. The way her feet found the pavement and her thighs drove and her belly swayed and her body refused to stop. She thinks about the diner. The pancakes torn with her fingers. The grease on her chin. The fart on the stool. She thinks about the number on the scale — 215 — and the word she thought when she saw it: more.

She comes with her back arched off the hardwood and her belly tight and her toes curling, her mouth open, a low guttural sound in her throat that is half groan and half growl. The orgasm rolls through her in long heavy waves and her body shakes and settles and shakes again and then she is still, her arms at her sides, her belly rising and falling, the sun warm on her skin, the food warm inside her. She doesn't move. She doesn't clean up. She closes her eyes and the floor holds her and the exhaustion from the run and the food and the orgasm pulls her down into a deep dreamless sleep that lasts four hours.

She wakes to the sound of the crowd. The television is on — she left it on after the morning news, and now it's afternoon and the game is playing and the green field fills the screen and the announcers are calling the play. She rolls onto her side, her belly resting on the hardwood, and watches. It's a Sunday game, two teams she doesn't care about, and she watches the way she always watches — for the rhythm of it, the violence, the architecture of men moving in space. The quarterback drops back. The pocket forms. And the offensive line holds.

Lena stops blinking. The left guard pulls — six-four, three-thirty, maybe three-forty, a man built like a wall with arms. He fires out of his stance and drives the defensive tackle sideways and his belly swings with the momentum, thick and round and enormous beneath his pads, and his legs drive and drive and drive and the tackle goes down. Lena sits up. The right tackle is six-six, three-fifty, his thighs like tree trunks, his belly hanging over his belt, and he pass-sets with a fluidity that shouldn't be possible at that size — the footwork quick, the hands precise, the weight shifting in a controlled avalanche. He is enormous and he is fast and he is precise and he is exactly the thing that Lena's body is becoming.

She watches the line for the rest of the quarter without moving. She watches the center — shorter, denser, three-twenty, built like a cube — snap the ball and reach the second level and bury a linebacker. She watches the guard pull again and lead the sweep, his belly swaying, his legs churning, the raw functional power of a body that has been built to move weight and take up space and impose its will on the ground beneath it. There is nothing wasted on any of them. The fat is not excess. The fat is architecture. It is mass that serves a purpose — leverage, momentum, the low center of gravity that lets a three-hundred-pound man move laterally without losing his base. The muscle is buried in the softness the way rebar is buried in concrete, and the combination is something that neither one alone could be.

Lena looks down at herself. Her belly, round and golden and full. Her thighs, thick and solid, the muscle visible when she flexes but hidden beneath the soft layer when she doesn't. Her arms, heavier now, the deltoids rounding out beneath the fat. Her chest, broad and heavy. Her feet, callused and black. She is six-three and two-fifteen and she is not what those men are — not yet, not by thirty or fifty or a hundred pounds — but the direction is clear. The vector is clear. Her body is building itself toward the same architecture: tall, heavy, soft and hard at the same time, functional mass, the kind of body that takes up space and moves weight and does not apologize for the space it takes. She watches the guard pull one more time and she thinks: that. I want that. I want to be that big and that strong and that fast and that impossible to move. And the thought is not the wish's voice. It is entirely, unmistakably her own.