Turn 13 of 28

Priya decides this is too much and breaks off their friendship. Lena isn't concerned, the friendship was on the downswing anyways. After she gets home, Lena strips naked again and soberly decides to open a dark web website to show off her disgusting body, drunk stuffings, and weight gain because it turns her on.

Priya is quiet for a long time after the lottery reveal, turning her latte cup in slow circles on the table. The coffee shop has thinned out — the afternoon crowd gone, just a barista wiping down the counter and a couple murmuring near the window. When Priya finally speaks, her voice is gentle and careful and final.

"Lena, I — I want to be honest with you." She pauses, choosing words.

"I was really excited to see you. I thought you looked amazing in those photos. I still think you look amazing. But this is... this is a lot. The wish, the body stuff, the not showering, and now ten billion dollars, and you're just sitting here telling me all of it like it's nothing, and I —" She stops. Her fingers tighten around the cup.

"I don't think I can be part of this. I'm sorry."

Lena watches Priya's face and feels — almost nothing. A flicker, maybe. The faintest tug of something that might have been disappointment a week ago, before the warmth, before the wish settled into her bones. But they hadn't spoken in months before the Instagram post. The friendship had been cooling for a year, quiet cancellations and unanswered texts and the slow mutual drift of two people who had once been close and no longer knew how to be. Priya had reached out because of a photo, not because of Lena. Lena knows this. The warmth pulses, steady and unconcerned.

"Okay," Lena says. No argument, no plea, no explanation. She picks up her empty cake plate and pushes back her chair, which groans beneath her. She stands, her belly hanging heavy and bare beneath the stretched crop top, and Priya looks up at her with an expression that is equal parts guilt and relief.

"I'm sorry," Priya says again.

"Don't be," Lena says. She drops a twenty on the table for the cake she already paid for and walks out of the coffee shop into the Friday afternoon sun, her body odor trailing behind her, the crop top riding up with every step, the shorts cutting into her hips. She doesn't look back.

The apartment welcomes her with its own smell — thick, dense, layered, hers. She strips off the crop top and the shorts and stands naked in the living room, the blanket on the couch stiff and damp, the food containers stacked beside it, the air warm and close. She feels the warmth pulse through her body and for the first time the thought that surfaces is clear and deliberate and entirely her own: she wants to be seen. Not by Priya, not by anyone she knows — by strangers, by people who would seek out exactly what she has become and want to watch.

She sits on the couch naked and opens her laptop for the first time in days. Her fingers are steady. She finds what she's looking for without much trouble — the internet has corners for everything, and hers is a body that tells a story. She creates an account on a site buried deep enough that no one from her old life will ever find it, and she takes a photo of herself sitting on the couch, belly round and heavy, thighs spread wide, the mess of containers visible around her, the stained blanket beneath her, her unwashed hair and visible body hair and the soft, satisfied expression on her face. She posts it with a caption: "gaining. growing. not stopping." Then she orders food, opens a bottle of wine, and waits for the first response.