"Oh God." I pitched forward against the wall, forehead to balled-up fists, and the bathroom echoed back a howl so animal I couldn't tell if I was coming or being pack-hunted. The tiles still rang with it long after I'd finished ruining your bath towel and blinked back into myself to find you tenderly working me through the afterglow ā one hand holding me by a back roll and the other fondling my brand new hang. My cherished pride and joy. My most brutal, electrifying shame.
"It looks good on you," you murmured softly; a delicious lie, yet somehow a kind of truth, as well. I met my eyes in the mirror, red and watering, once I could finally bear to. I still couldn't recognize my face.
You fell asleep that night watching me as I felt up and down the new crease where my belly dropped over, but I stayed awake for hours. The tops of the trees outside painted the ceiling with long, reaching shadows, and I couldn't stop thinking about the bathroom, and my own desperate howls hitting the tiles and bouncing back sharpened from every angle. Surrounding me. Your grip on my fat. The sense of the walls creeping closer. Pack animals can use their voices in a way that makes two wolves sound like twenty, and here, it's even easier to imagine. The white ceiling looks blue in the gloom, shadowed with the tops of a treeline. And in my periphery I can see mirrored sets of eyes watching from the darkness ā maybe two. Maybe twenty. Or maybe just the yellow charging light of your laptop and a few other perfectly ordinary things. I choose not to find out. I've formed a habit of not staring too hard into the dark. I'm too deep down the path to find my way back, anyway. Too drunk on the poison berries and too gripped by your dark magic. Too fat to run. I slipped into your bed for the first time like a sliver fish, shiny and agile, and I never left. I'm overgrowing it, like you're overgrowing me. It isn't just you, though. You're working with someone else, I can tell. In the rare moments like this, clear in the head, when I think like I used to, conscious enough to feel the hands still there, holding me by my rolls and fattening them for better grip, it's always two sets of hands. Maybe that could explain how it feels like yesterday that I was newly chunky and handing you a belt to train my plump little gut into my desired shape. Then, with a blur that smears away all detail like vaseline across a lens, some amount of time has passed which could just as easily be six days or six months, and I'm like this. Double-chinned and hanging over the front of my pants. Verging on unrecognizable so terrifyingly fast and without ever really stopping to think. I could ask myself, do you really want this? And I don't have an answer. Or instead, I have two ā both polar opposites and equally as compelling. At some point, something tipped the balance. Something got to me. Something that would have me walking straight into the center of a pack of wolves to lie down, lean my head back, bare my throat. Eat until I soften and dimple and spread. It's you, but it's not only you. Your desires account for only half the eyes watching me fatten through the tree line, surrounding me from every side, closing tighter every night. The other half are mine.
