Turn 35 of 228

Text Diane back a simple thank you, that you both know means more. Work through the morning and post an update about hitting 267 pounds. Then dive even further into your hedonism, no looking back. Impossibly, your work improves even further.

Lena opens the text thread with Diane and types three words: *Thank you, Diane.* She stares at them for a long moment — long enough that the cursor blinks twelve times — and sends it. The message sits on the screen, delivered, blue, small. She knows Diane will understand what it means. She doesn't need to explain. She sets the phone face-down on the desk and pulls the first client report from the queue.

The morning passes in a blur of data and hunger. Lena eats while she works — chips from the bag on the windowsill, soda warm and flat, cookies with soft crumbs that fall into the fold beneath her breasts and stay there. She farts at nine-thirty and the sound fills the small office and she doesn't pause. She burps at ten-fifteen and the taste of soda and stomach acid sits on her tongue and she swallows and keeps reading. Between reports she picks up her phone and opens OnlyFans and takes a photo — her belly pressing against the desk edge, the stubble on her jaw visible in the screen light, the wrapper and crumbs on the windowsill behind her — and types: *267 this morning. Seven pounds overnight. Ninety-seven pounds in eleven days. Still going.* She posts it and sets the phone down and opens the next report.

The work is better than it's ever been. Something in the crying last night — or the text, or the sleep that came without vodka pulling her under — has sharpened something behind the haze. She catches an error in a quarterly forecast that three analysts signed off on, a compounding mistake buried in a methodology footnote, and she flags it with a four-line explanation that Diane will read and understand the significance of. She restructures a client brief in two hours that would have taken her a full day two weeks ago, the logic tighter, the prose cleaner. She eats another bag of chips and the crumbs fall on the carpet next to the stain and she doesn't look at them. Her body fills the chair — 267 pounds of unwashed, unshaven, naked woman farting and burping and eating at her desk — and the work pours out of her like it's been waiting for something to stop blocking it.

At noon she masturbates in the chair with one hand while scrolling a dataset with the other, the orgasm quiet and deep and efficient, and she finishes the dataset before the afterglow fades. She pisses in the corner of the office at one o'clock — standing, letting it run down her legs and pool on the carpet next to the old stain, the warm ammonia smell mixing with the old food and her body — and sits back down and opens the next brief. Her thighs are wet and the chair absorbs it and she doesn't stand. The subscriber count ticks to 99 while she watches. She farts again and the office holds the smell and the carpet holds the stain and the work holds her attention and everything is exactly what it is.

By three o'clock she's cleared the entire queue. Fourteen reports, three briefs, one methodology review that found the compounding error. She sends the last file to Diane's inbox and leans back in the chair and her belly rises and falls with her breath and the office is warm and small and smells like her — the accumulated smell of a week of naked days and mess and food and piss — and the phone shows 101 subscribers and climbing. She picks it up and scrolls the new comments: *you're getting hotter every pound*, *the office posts are my favorite thing on the internet*, *what happens when you hit 300?* She reads the last question and feels the wish hum beneath her ribs and doesn't answer it. She doesn't need to. The answer is already happening.