Turn 12 of 228

Check the OnlyFans again for reactions to the bathroom pics. Then stay up all night and keep going. Go to work drunk, high and wearing the same string bikini you did on Sunday. Don't bother with any form of hygiene. Perform even better than Monday. Eat even more. Don't hold back farts and burps, make them loud, proud and stinky.

Lena reaches for her phone with greasy fingers, smearing the screen with chip oil as she opens the OnlyFans app. The bathroom photos have been up for two hours and the numbers have jumped — fifty-one subscribers now, eight new since she posted. The comments pile up under the stall photo, the one where her belly is bare under fluorescent light. *God your belly is getting huge.* *You look amazing, keep going.* *How much do you weigh now?* One commenter has tipped five dollars with a message that just says *more* and the word hits her like a match touching gasoline. She scrolls through the comments and feels the heat spread through her chest and down into her belly, and her hand drifts between her thighs again, and she thinks: strangers are watching me grow.

She doesn't sleep. The night becomes a blur of joints and beer and vodka and food — chips, cookies, the last of the ice cream, a box of cereal she eats dry by the handful. She belches and farts without restraint, the sounds bouncing off the kitchen walls, and the apartment fills with the smell of junk food and smoke and sweat. She masturbates three more times on the kitchen floor, surrounded by empty bags and bottles, her body shaking and glistening. By 4 AM she's finished the vodka and most of the beer and she's smoked two of the three joints and she's high in a way that makes the ceiling look like it's breathing. She takes photos throughout the night — her naked body on the floor, her belly tight with food, her skin stained with crumbs and grease — and posts the best ones. The subscriber count ticks to sixty-three.

Morning comes and she hasn't slept and she doesn't care. She finds the string bikini in the kitchen — the same one from Sunday, the strings still stretched from her wider body — and ties it on. The triangles cover less than they did two days ago. Her breasts spill over the top and sides, the fabric barely containing her nipples. The bottoms cut into her hips, the soft flesh bulging around the strings, and the back is a thin strip that disappears between her cheeks. She looks in the mirror and her body is bigger than Sunday — she can see it in the way the bikini fits, the way her belly pushes forward past the waistband, the way her thighs press together from hip to knee. She doesn't brush her teeth. She doesn't shower. She doesn't wipe. She walks out the door barefoot, still drunk, still high, and takes the bus to work.

The office reacts. She feels it the moment she walks through the door — the silence that ripples outward from the entrance, the heads turning, the deliberate looking away. Marcus drops his coffee. The intern stares for three full seconds before someone nudges her. Lena walks to her desk barefoot, her belly swaying with each step, the bikini strings creaking, crumbs from the night still stuck to her skin. She sits and the chair groans and she logs in. She farts — a long, loud, wet sound that carries across the open floor — and doesn't acknowledge it. Someone two desks over coughs. She burps while typing and the smell of beer and chips drifts across her workstation. She eats a family-size bag of cheese puffs at her desk, orange dust falling onto her belly and the keyboard, and between bites she closes out two tickets, drafts a client proposal, and finds a bug in the Q3 data that would have cost the company thousands if it had shipped.

Diane appears at her desk at 2 PM. She stands there for a long moment, looking at the bikini, the bare feet, the orange-dusted belly, and Lena can see the muscles in her jaw working. She opens her mouth. Then she closes it. Then she says, "The proposal is the best one I've seen this quarter. Can you have the revised version to me by Thursday?" and walks away. Lena leans back, belches loudly, and feels a deep, warm satisfaction settle through her body like the first pull of a joint.