Showing off at the bar with an old friend

Opening scene

Lena stood in front of the bathroom mirror after another long day of tugging at waistbands and hating the way clothes sat on her. Under her breath, half-joking and half-desperate, she whispered, “I just wish I could feel comfortable in my body for once. Really comfortable.”

A soft warmth spread through her stomach. She shrugged it off and went to bed.

The next morning her favourite jeans were noticeably tighter. By the afternoon her belly sat a little heavier against the waistband. That night she caught herself resting a hand on the soft new curve and feeling… oddly calm. A quiet thought that didn’t quite feel like her own drifted through her mind: This is better. Let it keep going.

She tried to ignore it. The scale the next day said otherwise. The wish had already started working — and it had no intention of stopping at “a little softer.”

Turn 1 of 8

Revel in your changes and show them off in small and tight clothes.

The apartment is quiet at half past seven, the kind of quiet that makes the fridge hum sound like company. Lena drags the laundry basket into the bedroom and dumps it on the duvet, and instead of reaching for the loose knit cardigan she has hidden behind for two years, she pulls out the ribbed grey top she bought when she was twenty-one and thin and miserable. It goes on with effort. It does not go on politely. The hem rides up over the new fullness of her stomach and stays there, and the fabric stretches pale over her hips, and Lena stands in front of the wardrobe mirror waiting for the familiar hot shame to arrive.

It does not arrive. What arrives instead is something almost like laughter. She turns sideways, then all the way around, watching how the material gives up trying to flatten anything and simply reports the truth: a soft outward curve below her ribs, a thicker set of thighs pressing together, a roundness at the back of her that used to be an angle. She presses a palm to her belly and feels warmth push back against it, and the thought comes in that same borrowed voice, patient and pleased. *Look at that. Look how much of you there is now.*

“Okay,” she says out loud, to no one. “Okay, fine. You win.”

The jeans are next and the jeans are ridiculous. She has to lie on the bed to get the button anywhere near the hole, and when it finally goes she lies there breathless and grinning at the ceiling like a teenager who has gotten away with something. Standing up, she can feel every inch of the waistband being asked to do more than it was designed for, the denim cutting a soft crease above it, her belly settling over the top of it with the weight of something that intends to stay. Six weeks ago that pressure would have ruined her whole evening. Tonight it feels like being held.

She puts on music, the loud thumping kind she never plays when the neighbours are awake, and moves around the kitchen making dinner in clothes that do not fit her at all. She catches her reflection in the dark window over the sink — the tight grey line of the top, the fullness of her arms, the way her hips knock the drawer shut when she turns — and she looks, deliberately, the way you look at someone you are getting to know.

Then the phone lights up on the counter. **Priya**, and under it: *drinks tomorrow? you've been dodging me for a MONTH, Park.* Lena stares at it with a fork in her hand. Priya has known her since university. Priya will see, in about twenty-two hours, exactly how much of Lena there is now — and the strange thing, the thing that makes her set the fork down slowly, is that some new part of her wants that very badly.