So, I read this story that NYCWriter posted to the BellyBuilders message board and I was totally blown away. It managed to evoke in me an excitement about gaining that no story had managed to evoke since I was 15 years old and just discovering gainer fiction. In other words, it's fantastic. You should read it.
In NYCWriter's own words:
"I'm working on a book of interrelated short stories entitled RUSH HOUR OF THE GODS. It's about a group of people navigating fetish, fringe sexuality, gender confusion, or weirdo relationships, etc. And I wrote a sorta gainer story for the book. The book is for "civilians" (so it's sort of devoid of code or identity monikers or any of that stuff), and I wasn't really writing it to be super hot or sexy to gainers and/or gainer enthusiast. I was rather trying to work the characters' conflict into the larger story of the book and use the metaphor of blah blah blah... God, writers are such douchebags.
Anyway, I figured I'd post it on here and see what you guys think.
Oh, PS - I hold the copyright to the story, etc, under my real name. So please don't post this anywhere else.
PPS - My writing's a little florid. I used to cream over Faulkner in English class. Sorry."
I got his permission to re-post it here (benevolent soul that he is) but, be respectful that he's a writer and this is his intellectual property, and don't re-post it without his permission. Now on to the awesome:
PERCY FULL
by
NYCWriter
Mike was early. The restaurant wasn’t full; he could see empty tables and booths here and there amongst the din of Sunday brunch patrons. But the hostess told him he couldn’t be seated until Sal arrived. She suggested that he wait at the bar. Mike told her that would be alright. Then she tightened her lips into a tiny closed mouth smile and shrugged, as if apologizing for the policy; as if she was saying that she would change it if only she could, just for him, but her hands were tied. Mike really didn’t mind; usually he would have liked to be seated when meeting someone for a date, or what he assumed might be a date, even though he had no idea what was going to happen when Sal walked through the door. Under normal circumstances, he liked to be seated, let the person walk in and slip into the booth with few expectations. Under normal circumstances, if he was standing, the other person would feel bad for being late (even if Mike was early) and then they’d have that awkward moment when they met – do they shake hands? Do they hug? Under normal circumstances, if it became awkward right away, it rarely stopped being awkward for the remainder of the date. But this was anything but normal circumstances. In this case, Mike thought it would be better if Sal saw him standing up, in full view, next to the bar when he walked in to the restaurant.
Mike unzipped his jacket. As he slipped it off of his shoulder, his fingers slid across his stomach, and he paused. Every time his hands discovered it, he felt a quick electric spark of surprise that made his heart beat a little faster and his joints dance like horny teenagers all over his body. He slid his finger along the surface of it, remembering the former definition, the way his muscles had felt like a clean symmetrical mountain range he’d tried to accentuate with tight shirts or the occasional, accidental flash when he ran his hand along the hem of his shirt and up and under to scratch some itch that didn’t exist; his very own continental divide he hoped attractive men at bars and clubs or on the streets or on the train would venture to cross with their eyes. Now that was mostly gone, replaced with this smooth, soft flesh, a fertile plain that stretched for miles but was still slowly expanding to new frontiers. As his fingers ran over his new belly, he applied pressure, and the skin bent and depressed, giving to his touch, the new fat vibrating for miles. Mike closed his eyes, enjoying the moment. Sometimes he would forget it was there until moments like these, when it met his hands like old flames meeting after years apart, and the attraction is still there, the passion seems to erase the time absent from each other, and possessed, they wrap themselves up in a swirl of heat and pleasure as if nothing else in the world existed but the thin line of contact between fingers and skin.
Mike removed his jacket, sliding it down his arm, pausing again as he noticed his massive shoulder and bicep bulging from beneath his shirt. Again, his body seemed to spark to life, but this time it was different, a cooler, more forceful electricity that shot up his spine and made him stand fully erect, grow two inches taller, to tower over himself, not as if he was outside of his body but inside it in ways he’d never experienced before. Mike placed his jacket on the back of the chair at the bar and looked down at his arms and his chest. The buttons on his shirt were barely containing his pecs, which had stretched wide and out and were now as hard as rocks. He clenched his fists and the muscles inflated in his arms like animals waking from hibernation. They yawned, full like moons, and growled with desire, desire to grab, to lift, to tear, to crush, and to punch the docile veneer of civilization hanging over everything and everyone around him like plates of fragile colored glass. He noticed himself flexing in the mirror behind the bar, and also noticed his neck was thicker, and his face was fuller, ringed by the tiniest halo of flesh that he only noticed because he’d spent weeks staring at himself in the mirror. The man staring back at him now oozed power from every pore, seeming to stretch the flat plane of the mirror with his size, threatening to shatter the glass with the next sudden move. The reflection, made real by the subtle creeping exploration of his fingers on his muscles, made his cock in his pants stir and swell, swell like his body; both, in his eyes, were becoming beautiful.
Thirty pounds. That was how much weight he had put on in the last few months. The thought of it made his cock slide down the leg of his pants, and he turned away from the mirror, placing his crotch against the back of the chair at the bar so none of the other patrons would notice his erection. At the beginning of the year, he was as he’d always been; svelte, athletic, the kind of man who went to the gym five times a week, ran miles and miles in desperate attempts to keep up with the standards of attractiveness set by those around him. He’d feared his body, the potential it carried to devolve from that rock hard athleticism, and he tried to beat it at every turn with the sweaty intensity of a marathoner hoping the finish line would appear in the distance when he got over the next hill, but then he’d realized there was no finish line, not for him, and he’d peeled off from the race. He’d given up, on the old path at least, and trotted down a different path. He changed his whole life around, and now, as a result, he had gotten fat. He had gotten big. And he was getting bigger. And he loved it.
It had always been in the back of his mind. Even as a child, he’d stared at men, big men, and felt his adolescent sexuality flare like nostrils smelling something sweet. He watched them at work, at construction sites, wielding implements and lifting steel structures that seemed impossibly large, ready to crush them, but then their muscles inflated in their arms and chest and legs and brought them closer to gods. He watched them when they ate, stealing glances while out at restaurants with his family, marveling at the way they consumed with abandon, almost crazed in the way they lifted forks to their mouths and guzzled down beer, letting their stomachs stretch in pursuit of the feeling of being full. When they’d finished, and they lay their massive shoulders against the back of their chairs, absent-mindedly rubbing their guts in celebration of that feeling, Mike couldn’t help but rub the bulge in his pants.
When he was younger, he’d figured he was just attracted to them; he wanted to be closer to those beautiful mountains of flesh. But the more he thought about it, late at night in his bed drawing pictures of plus-sized Greek gods in his sketchbook, the more he realized it was more complicated than that. It wasn’t just that he was attracted to them; he was jealous of them. They had embraced the freedom in their adulthood and grown huge; they’d consciously eaten more than they needed, lifted more than they thought they could, grabbed power like despots over their bodies, dictators who demanded the impossible to build their empires and who had made war on the peaceful societies around them to become so big that the sun would never set upon them. Mike drew the men he saw into the future, anticipating how they would grow, the places that would continue to thicken and stretch, the parts that would soften and sag, the parts they would rub until they were ripe, and they thought they were done, they couldn’t possibly get any bigger, all the while knowing they couldn’t stop. But then, Mike would run his hands over the drawings, feeling their flatness, their lack of dimension, a progression of fantasies that he knew could never be made real for him. These were men who might as well be superheroes; two-dimensional science fiction characters he dreamed about while he was buried under three-dimensional fact.
Mike’s mother and father were marathon runners. They trained constantly, pushing their bodies to leathery leanness with morning runs and constant, careful nutrition. They kept food in the house more as a challenge than anything else, to undermine the damage it could do to their physiques, and when they cooked, the tore apart and broke down lean meat and vegetables in ways that nature never intended. Taste was incidental; food was more of an unsavory chore than anything to be enjoyed, and when Mike complained as a child, his desires seemed to fester in his parents’ eyes like a cancer upon their house, something that needed to be cut out as soon as possible before it could spread.
“You can’t eat that!” his mother would say, nearly hysterical in the grocery store when Mike would ask for something sweet. “It’ll make you fat! Do you want to be fat? Fat and ugly?”
Mike didn’t dare provide an honest answer. To him, it was his mother’s gaunt face that appeared ugly, the way her eyes seemed to narrow into slits and her cheekbones assaulted her face like knives stabbing from inside her skull. Her skin seemed so tight and brown from hours and hours in the sun starved of nutrients that she seemed unable even to smile when he relented. He went home with his mother to have a piece of lean chicken, bleached of any taste and amputated of any fat, while dreaming of the cake or ice cream he hadn’t fought for, but feeling his mother’s horror and harsh words bubbling below like a nightmare. After dinner, he’d go back into his room to draw, flaring out the curves of his fantasy men, but making their faces uglier and uglier, more damaged by their decisions, more monstrous as they grew in size.
Those images of trollish men followed him into adulthood, echoing the warnings of his mother about fatness and ugliness. They followed him into the gym, where he went to run five times a week, and no matter how far he went on the treadmill they always seemed to be right in his ear. They guided his hand as he chose his meals, burning him with irrational thoughts of the ways each item he ate could poison his body, turn him ugly. The shrill fear whittled away at his body, reshaped it in a different fashion from those men he’d seen at construction sites or stuffing themselves in restaurants. His waist contracted and hardened, balling his stomach into a powerful fist. His jawline became sharp, plowing through the air as he ran like the bow of a ship cutting across the ocean. His body tightened into a compact machine, all lean muscles and bones. And men noticed it. Out at bars with his friends or online on the cruising websites, he felt their eyes reach out, hungering for his tight body and handsome face, athletic and light and quick like the sex they wanted.
And for a time, he reveled in it. There was power in it; even if he couldn’t feel it in his bones, it coursed through his mind like hydraulic steam. He saw how the slightest smile could melt the proudest faggot at the bar, how a wink could make him flutter and shake, how a small turn of the head could make him deflate, make all the parts he’d refined like Mike had reveal themselves for artifice and fall apart like condemned buildings. When he had sex with them, they hugged at him like he wasn’t real, couldn’t possibly be, couldn’t possibly have deigned to welcome such a mortal into his bed. They thanked him with their lips, and wouldn’t hesitate to swallow everything he had to teach them.
But for all of the power Mike had over them, for all the ways he slid them over his fingers and his face and his voice like a preacher, it was empty. He didn’t believe any of it. They’d slide their hands up him like an altar but they might have been snakes. To him, he wasn’t nearly as beautiful as they whispered in his ear. He could control them, and liked the control, but there wasn’t something mean to it, dismissive, defensive, and he worried it would crumble at the slightest touch. And though they fawned over him, when he saw a big man somewhere, some powerful being, a God walking enormous with muscles that crowded him and a belly which stretched out in front of him like eternity and an ass that pulsed and shook like energy deferred, the tiny fawning faggots dissolved, they meant nothing, and all his work to tighten his lean body into a mask felt like a lie.
And then it had been there. On his waist, the slightest piece of extra skin. No one else would have noticed it, only Mike saw it, expert as he was in attention to his own details. The piece of extra skin was soft and new, and spoke to him through his body like a hypnotist, assuring him it was just a harbinger of things to come, age to come, slowing metabolism, creeping desire. Mike laid his hands on it, and it pulsed like possibility. Whenever this had happened before, some lack of exercise or increase in stress growing new skin on his midsection or some extra on his hips, Mike’s flesh had vibrated with panic. He’d felt sweat develop just under the skin, ready to be unleashed in a flurry of clawing, desperate exercise. His mind had cried out to fix this, fix it, fix his body, and the voice sounded shrill like his mother’s, glaring at him with those two slits for eyes and her cheekbones ripping through her face like claws to grab him. But this time, when his skin and sweat and mind cried out at him, he’d ignored them. He stroked the new flesh like it was precious, and stayed home from the gym.
And the next day, Mike didn’t go to the gym. And the day after that, he didn’t go to the gym either. On that third day, he walked down the street to the grocery store. He wandered off of his usual path and ventured into parts unknown, sweet parts, with bright colors and flashy names that promised pleasure and love and companionship he’d denied himself. He slid the items into his cart, each one falling in heavy and thick making his bewildered cock grow in his pants. They were joined by real food items he’d thought impossible to buy before: real butter; real mayonnaise; whole milk; heavy cream; ice cream, real ice cream, in myriad experimental flavors, his old childhood standbys of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry obsolesced and obliterated by the ingenuity of man; meat, red meat, and bacon, the frozen strips of pig fat crackled in his hands as he lifted them into his cart. He imagined grease running down his arms, across his chest, down his stomach, flooding his pubic hair and staining his cock. The thought made him hard, harder than he could remember being in some time. He raced the cart through the grocery store to check out.
Once home, Mike pulled out a skillet to make a hamburger. He greased up the pan and threw on the meat. He watched as it sizzled and browned, flipping it and letting the round, pleasing odor waft around his head, making him dizzy. He slid a thick piece of cheese onto the burger, and fried up three strips of bacon next to it. When it was ready, the cheese had melted, and the bacon was dancing on the edges of the skillet, Mike placed them onto a bun and beheld his creation, touching it carefully with his finger like God breathing life into Adam. It still sizzled with the quiet sounds of his body growling in protest, his mind angrily denouncing him for his coming transgression. They screamed in terror as he bit into the burger, and then he couldn’t stop himself. He consumed it roughly, like a starving man, his teeth growing and his face changing to accommodate his voracious transformation into a carnivore. And then it was gone, and the taste of it ran over his lips and down his throat and up behind his eyes and into his head with a soothing, sensual voice. But Mike was still hungry. Without thinking, he opened his freezer and took out a carton of ice cream, digging into it with a spoon and letting the cold minty confection dance together with the hot grease that still lay on his tongue. The ecstatic heat of his hands melted the ice cream in the carton, and he swallowed the soupy cream in large gulps until he was drunk on it, until it filled his stomach and stretched the edges, and he felt full. The feeling of being full was the most intoxicating part; it was new and dangerous, and his body panicked happily as his midsection bulged, putting pressure on his organs. But none felt the pressure like his cock, which swelled with each bite, engorged with blood and fat in celebration of Mike’s newfound gluttony. On his couch, stuffed full, he explored his excited cock with his hands until he came, the pressure of the food and pleasure and purpose inside him shooting the semen so high it hit the ceiling.
The next day, Mike went back to the gym, but he walked past the treadmills and the exercise bikes. He’d spent hours on them, hours of his life he realized he had to get back now. He walked instead to the weights. He began to lift as much as he could, feeling the soreness crawl over his lean muscles, challenging them to go further, feeling them expand in painful death-throes to be replaced by bigger ones the next day. One of the trainers approached him, asking if he wanted advice. Mike nodded, and the trainer began to explain some of the newer equipment and exercises Mike could do.
“What kind of look are you going for?” the trainer asked, pausing between machines. “Are you looking to tone up or are you looking to add mass?” Mike saw the trainer’s eyes swiftly rake over his body, taking him in, and the thought of him getting sized up in this way stirred a deep tremor in his libido.
“I want to get bigger,” Mike said, and the truth of it echoed like reveille.
From then on, Mike was a machine. He went to the gym regularly, glancing meaningfully at the bikes and treadmills before joining his trainer by the weights. His body seemed possessed, even his trainer was surprised at how quickly his strength developed. Mike increased the weight faster and faster, ascending to more and more advanced levels, even as his muscles screamed in pain. After coming home from the gym, he ate, as much as he could, beyond his capacity, until his stomach stretched and he felt that full feeling again, that beautiful feeling of being stuffed that seemed to break him free of the bounds of his body and send him floating into some sensual caloric euphoria, only to be transcended by the towering nirvana of his hand upon his bellowing cock.
And as this routine continued, Mike’s body changed. His arms widened, his biceps ballooned, his shoulders inflated, and his back flew away from the rest of his body, forming spines like a dinosaur. His chest breathed out like a ship’s sail in the breeze, his nipples seemingly always erect and growing more sensitive by the day. His stomach slid away from his body like a glacier, dropping to lower elevations and spreading out across the floodplain of his waistband. When he walked, it began to move independently, shaking and quaking with new life. His waist thickened until he couldn’t button his pants anymore, and had to buy the next size up. His ass sloped away from his body, and his hands seemed always to find it, perpetually fascinated by its new dimensions, they snuck back there when he wasn’t looking to weigh their options for growth. Each new pound transformed him, no part was extra, every piece was used to its absolute fullest. Every piece of clothing that became tighter, every new section of weight, every new movement of his growing body made him want to eat more, lift more, and become huge. He had never, in his life, felt sexier.
Of course, not everyone agreed with him. His friends, the men he accompanied to the bars, seemed to regard him at first with puzzlement. A few said they thought the muscle suited him, but openly critiqued his decision to lift weights. You’re doing too much, they’d say. You just want to tone up a little, don’t you? You’re going to end up looking weird. Mike brushed off their criticisms, but when the fat began to pile on along with the muscle, they confronted him the way they might a drug addict. They accused him of being unhappy, and demanded to know what was wrong. When he assured them that nothing was wrong, and that he had just changed his diet, this confused them even more. Why would he do that, they demanded. Didn’t he realize how bad he looked now? He used to be so good looking, and now he was just getting fat and ugly.
Their words seemed to grab at his body like judgmental hands, clutching with claws and handfuls of fat and shaking it to show him what it was. They left marks as they dug down, trying to find his bones. He told himself he didn’t believe them; he told himself he was happy, that every new, growing part of him turned him on in ways that no other man could. But their derision cut through his security and unwrapped him to feel shame. Their points were underscored by a marked change in attention Mike received from other men. The fatter he became, the more invisible he seemed; the more space he took up the more he seemed possessed of a vacuum that would bend space and light and male attraction around him like a black hole. Now his looks were met with confusion; his come hither glances elicited nothing but laughter. Every day his libido was rising, soon he thought of nothing but food and sex, but he wondered if he’d made a fool’s bargain and could only now have one or the other. Maybe his friends were right, maybe his mother was right. No matter how he felt on the inside, he had turned himself ugly.
Mike was filled with a swirl of emotions. They wrapped themselves up with all the food he was consuming and made him nauseous. Soon he found he was eating less, and less. He didn’t want to stop, but he didn’t know where he was going, or what the point of this experiment was (if it was an experiment). He had discovered something about himself, something pure and true, the most inner truth he had, that had transformed his body and unlocked his sex, but was he now supposed to go back to the way he was?
It was around this time that he heard from Sal. He met Sal several years prior, at a party. He was a friend of Mike’s friend Peter, someone else from the old neighborhood, another son of Italian immigrants like Peter. Mike and Sal had run into each other a couple times since they’d met, always within a group, always exchanging a few casual, friendly words. They were acquaintances, only, so Mike was surprised to receive a call from him asking if they could meet for brunch the next day. Sal said he’d had a reservation and a friend had cancelled at the last minute. And besides, Sal said, they needed to catch up. Mike wanted to ask why they needed to catch up, but the words in his head sounded rude. He agreed, more curious than anything, and later that day when he saw Peter, he asked him why Sal would invite him to Brunch.
Peter had looked Mike up and down slowly, and then nodded. “I’m not surprised,” Peter said, with a smirk. “Sal likes fat guys.”
Peter meant it as a cutting remark, another in a long line of comments from Mike’s friends that seemed designed to convince him to lose weight, but instead it hit Mike like a jolt of electricity that made his knees shake.
“But he hasn’t seen me,” Mike said, clamping down on his voice to keep it from excitedly stammering. “Not since...” Mike didn’t know how to describe it, so he let himself trail off. Peter snickered.
“Maybe someone told him how huge you are now,” Peter said, with a judgmental flick of his head. “Go if you want. But the guys Sal dates are monsters.”
Mike realized he might have seen one of these “monsters,” at a party, hanging out with Sal, though he wasn’t sure the two had been together. Mike noticed him immediately, his feelers out as they were constantly for big men; the man was dark-skinned and enormous, nearly 280 pounds at quick estimation. He leaned against a wall near the kitchen in the apartment, his back arched, and his large stomach stuck out into the room like a fjord. Mike stared at him, sipping his glass of wine, not noticing anyone else, only barely noticing Sal beside the man, but now in his memory he noticed Sal’s eyes climbing up and down the man’s giant geology. But that man really was huge, so much bigger than Mike. No matter what Sal had been told, he had to know that, but still there was this mystery invitation, some rendezvous arranged on news that Mike had gained significant weight, moving closer to this ideal, the man at the party leaning back like a baron stealing glances from the smaller men at the party, from Mike with plaintive fascination, and from Sal, who in Mike’s memory now reached out with his hand to stroke his giant boyfriend’s massive gut. The new thoughts, the possibilities, that he would be like that giant man under Sal’s hand, clenched his sex like a fist until it bled hot, stronger now than ever before from his exercise of it.
So Mike had come, and now he was waiting, his heart beating faster to match the rapid syncopation of ice clinking in glasses and silverware scratching against plates. Looking at the food, he felt hunger rage through him like an angry child, banging its fists against his bones, demanding to be sated. Ever since he started eating more, he’d been surprised to find himself almost always hungry. He would eat an enormous meal until he was full to bursting, and then two hours later, it was as if he’d eaten nothing. His stomach would wake and dig its claws into his throat until he ate more. He’d eaten a big breakfast not three hours before, but now the wafting smells of eggs benedict and Belgian waffles and sizzling meat and melting butter made his insides rabid. The panic of hunger pushed his heart further; he thought for a second that he was going to vomit from anticipation, and that he should sit and put his head between his knees. But he wasn’t even completely sure what he was anticipating.
And then Sal was at the door, talking to the hostess, who pointed him back towards the bar. He rounded the corner, and Mike took a look at him again for the first time. He was tall, taller than Mike, and his black hair was tossed back on his head, though when he rounded the corner some of it fell into his face, and his face registered the slightest annoyance, as if at constant war with his style, every product possible put into it to placate its rebelliousness but nothing seemed to work, like a child who now only acted up because he could. He was wearing a fitted shirt that showed off the oeuvre of his body; slim waist that slid into his jeans, but as you ventured up, his torso flared in all directions, making his body appear like a V. The muscles of his chest and arms were visible beneath the shirt, but Mike smiled as he realized they were so much smaller than his own. Mike had never before entertained sexual thoughts of Sal, but looking at him now, he realized just how handsome he was; his dark Italian features punctuated by the slightest five o’clock shadow, his eyes verdant and sparking with life, his lips curving into a smile as he approached Mike. Mike wondered why he hadn’t noticed him in this way before.
And then, Sal’s expression changed. As he approached Mike his eyes widened and ventured down, burning holes into Mike’s undeniable girth, caressing his thick belly as it bulged from beneath his shirt. His walk slowed, each step finding the floor of the restaurant like a surprise, expecting nothing physical in the world to be real, dimensions impossible now, impermanent, the whole world moving and changing like time lapse film of flowers seizing towards sunlight. The slowness of the moment caught in Mike’s throat like a cold hand, and he momentarily forgot his hunger; Sal’s look, hungering over his fat in a way that until that point he’d only seen in the mirror, made his body swell and his organs shift and his cock thicken; until that point, it seemed only by eating, and eating seemingly ridiculous amounts, could he create that central, sought-after sensation, but here it was; Sal was feeding him with his excited stare.
Sal greeted Mike, and hugged him, his arm sliding conspicuously around Mike’s waist, his hand laying flat on Mike’s soft love handle. The contact returned Mike’s hunger to him, and his stomach growled. Sal pretended not to notice.
“You look great,” Sal said.
“Thanks,” Mike said, smiling and blushing. “I feel great.”
The hostess showed them to a booth, and they sat down. Mike had never been to this restaurant before, and Sal gleefully pointed out menu items that he recommended. The waitress returned, and Sal ordered eggs benedict. Mike examined the menu thoughtfully, and felt the hot radiating anticipation of both the waitress and Sal for his choice. He settled on French toast, but as the waitress collected his menu, he paused, and asked if he could have an extra side of sausage. The waitress took note and walked away. Sal was holding back a grin.
“Sounds like you have quite the appetite,” he said, trying to be nonchalant, but the question caught in his throat on the way out, and he nearly swallowed the word “appetite.”
“I’ve been so hungry, lately,” Mike said. “I’m eating all the time.” Mike leaned back in the booth, letting his stomach slide over his jeans like an advancing army. Even though they had just sat down, their conversation nothing but small talk and incomprehensible winks and suggestions, Mike wanted to push Sal further. He felt compelled to figure out his motives. “I’ve put on so much weight,” Mike fished.
Sal stared at Mike, deep in thought, carefully mulling over the words that sat on the table like a shared appetizer. The waitress returned with coffee and their drinks – two mimosas, one for each of them, included in the price of brunch. Sal quickly grabbed his glass, his eyes digging into Mike’s eyes, trying to unearth him.
“It suits you,” he said, and lifted up his glass to toast. Mike took his, and they tapped their glasses together. Sal devolved into some quiet giggles before drinking down whatever silent, secret thing their toast had contracted between them.
“You really think so?” Mike asked.
Sal shot him a look, a shorthand look, amused at Mike’s continued prodding, as if his eyes had already dug to the core of Mike and there were no secrets anymore and Mike’s code seemed superfluous and comical now. “Of course,” he said. “I always thought you were too skinny. And the muscles suit you well, too.”
Mike blushed again, the heat of his blood making his head reel. He was hungry, and his mimosa, already drained, was sticking to the back of his throat and making him light headed. Men had looked at him before, taking inventory of his body, extrapolating his limits, predicting a future in which they would be closer to him, taking in his smells, feeling the rough friction of wet hair against skin as they scratched and clawed to get deep inside him, to one tiny island of pure pleasure encased in meat. But no one had ever looked at him the way Sal was looking at him, hungry for conquest in some ancient Roman way, like he was a new country who was letting down his defenses with this coy, seemingly innocuous discussion of his new weight. And where the others traveled to that isolated island, Sal’s eyes surveyed the expanse with more ambition, every surface kissed by sunlight lifted his eyebrows, and even the parts not visible, rumors pressing against Mike’s shirt as he leaned back in the booth, and each inch was pure pleasure; to Sal, staring at him over his mimosa, he was the ripest country on Earth. This was nothing compared to his power over men in the old world, as his old self. He flexed his arms, felt his muscles explode, and drew Sal across the curves in his body with the powerful thrust of a beast of burden.
Sal became conscious of his staring, and quickly changed the subject from the dimensional discussion, their small talk clicking together to match the rhythm of the other conversations in the busy restaurant. They talked about work. Sal worked for a large financial services company as some kind of analyst. “Basically,” Sal said, “I grow assets. The banker at the head of my team brings in people’s money, and we invest it in products to make more money. It’s not very interesting. I’m jealous of you.”
“Why?” Mike asked.
“Well I used to be an actor. Did you know?” Mike shook his head, no. “That’s what I went to school for. I was on Broadway. But in the end it became too difficult to wait tables, go to auditions, sit around waiting for the phone to ring. There didn’t seem to be a goal I was working towards, so I got out of it and went into finance. But I still miss it… Being an artist.”
Mike chuckled. “I’m hardly an artist,” he said. “I work with Photoshop all day. I never get to draw anymore.”
“You still stayed closer to the person you wanted to be,” Sal said. “You’ll have to teach me how to do that.” And then he laughed, flashing teeth without subtext, simply happy, and sweet, and full of energy that seemed to scrub the room of other sounds and caught Mike off-guard. Coming out to meet him that morning, Mike expected that Sal might make suggestive remarks, tickle his eyes over Mike’s new form, but he didn’t expect the warmth, the goofy humor; he nearly forgot why he came. Before now, Mike placed Sal with all of the rest of the guys he hung out with, who lived in a world of cut or be cut, that even Mike played into as well, like a native dialect of defensive dismissal. But as Sal told Mike more about his job, and his family, and growing up in the old neighborhood with Peter, and the other details of his life, he was less like those bitchy queens and more like an excited child; the quicker he spoke, the more his city Italian accent would crawl in and out of the cracks of his words, so different from the clipped language of the others, making Mike feel ashamed he ever spoke in the old tongue. It relaxed Mike, and he also opened up, telling Sal more about his family, more about his job as a graphic designer, and it felt like a date, assuredly like a date, there wasn’t any doubt anymore, but for those few moments, sex seemed to have disappeared, their bodies were incidental, only their voices, and their stories, and Mike realized how long it had been since he’d been in this place where he had everything but could forget it at the same time.
The waitress came with a new mimosa for both of them; they’d finished theirs absent-mindedly during their deepening conversation. Mike remarked that he probably shouldn’t drink too much in the middle of the day, but when Sal raised his new glass to Mike, such promises felt unnecessary and they drank, and would drink, until their heads were hot and their minds were free. Almost immediately after, however, the waitress returned, laden with plates of food – Sal’s eggs benedict and Mike’s French toast with a side of sausage.
Mike ran the side of his fork through the soft, egg-bloated slice of bread, and as he did, syrup and butter and cinnamon overflowed from the sides like organs of a body as he dissected it. The wound screamed with voices, his mother, always there, his friends who were rapidly departing from his world, and as the white and brown and yellow dripped from the sweet piece at the end of his fork like the head of an enemy on a spike, his mind anticipated the transgression, each transgression like the first, his body making room for it, shifting his organs and bones and skin around to receive it. He slid it onto his tongue and the shock of it, the sharp sweetness turned up the corners of his mouth in surprise and he counted the seconds of pleasure as the piece of French toast rolled down his throat, into his stomach, his body roaring into action, the thought of the calories in that one piece, soon to be joined by more, exploded through his veins like a flood, going straight to his cock, which inflated, and demanded more. Mike cut more pieces, repeating the action, quickening his pace, the sugar rushing through his body, turning every sensory node to its highest setting, until he was a machine again. He became aware, hyper-aware, of movements and changes, his stomach filling up and stretching, his belly distending and straining the buttons of his shirt, his pants digging uncomfortably into his body as his waist crept outwards to accommodate the burden, his cock growing as he increased. But even as he focused inwards, he felt eyes upon him. He looked up. Sal regarded him with fascination, his mouth hanging open slightly, his eyes wide like a revelation.
“You look like you’re enjoying that,” he said, and his voice trembled. His eyes were popping out of his head; there was more here than appreciation for Mike’s body.
“It’s really good,” Mike said, and speared a link of his sausage. He lifted it to his mouth, watching Sal the whole time, watching his eyes grow, his eyeballs straining against their cages, his irises dancing skirts lifted up in ecstasy. Sal’s reactions made Mike’s heart beat faster, though that could have been the sugar rushing in and out of his chest, but it was different than before. Mike didn’t feel powerful, he didn’t feel like he was playing with Sal as he bit into the fatty meat. This wasn’t some new translation of the impersonal power he held over the men who’d loved his old body, who’d put him up on a pedestal even though he didn’t trust them, it was something else, it was… Happiness. That’s what was flowing out of Sal’s eyes and his ears as he watched Mike eat. And Mike ate now not because he was hungry, he was getting full after all, but because by doing so he could coax happiness from Sal, until it was stretching Sal’s skin from beneath like the meal was stretching Mike’s and they shared it, the happiness, in contented silence.
A woman at a nearby table cackled at some unheard joke, and the sound broke Mike and Sal out of their symbiosis. Mike knew the woman hadn’t been laughing at them, but he immediately became self-conscious. He could only imagine what they looked like; two men, silent, the bigger one pigging out on French toast and sausage while the smaller one stared at him with a lascivious look on his face, barely touching his own meal. He wondered if anyone had been watching them. He wondered what his friends would say, especially their mutual friends. Mike put his fork down for a second and stared at the food, not yet finished, still looking delicious, visibly weighed down with fat and calories, but also with significance, and the significance was making it taste funny, like something from his past; it brought up memories but nothing specific he could describe, sounds, blurry images, and then his mouth was filled with the taste, and his appetite seemed dead. He thought, in that moment, that he could never eat another thing for the rest of his life if it was going to taste like that.
“Hey, are you okay?” Sal asked.
Mike said that he was fine. There was a long pause, and the sounds of the restaurant grew, and the conversations around them became clearer, and Mike couldn’t concentrate on any of them, but still his mind tried to shift through them, looking for descriptions of him or of Sal. Someone had to have seen them. Someone knew what was going on between them.
“I thought about going to a movie later,” Sal said. “You’re welcome to come with me if you want. I mean, if you don’t have anything going on.”
“What movie?” Mike asked.
“Well, I wanted to go see this movie a second time.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Have you seen it?”
Mike thought he hadn’t heard of it, then remembered seeing advertisements on television. “Isn’t that a kid’s movie?” he asked.
“Sort of. It’s based on a series of kids books. Kind of like Harry Potter.”
Mike wasn’t sure how to react to this suggestion. The strange taste in his mouth was rising again. He said he didn’t usually go to movies like that.
“I know, it’s weird, right? Probably sound kinda creepy for suggesting it, but… I dunno, I’m sort of fascinated with movies and books like that, you know. They’re all built on the same structure, it’s all very psychological. About getting to kids on their level. It’s sort of a hobby, I guess. Seeing the ways they’re similar.”
Mike shrugged. He wasn’t sure what Sal meant.
“Well… Do you mind me telling you the premise?” Mike said he didn’t.
“Basically, it’s about this kid, Percy Jackson, who is a demigod. Like, half man, half God. Like Hercules. But at the beginning of the story, you think he’s just a typical middle school kid. And he thinks that, too, he’d adopted, he’s kind of thought of as a trouble-maker, and also he’s hyperactive and dyslexic, so he has trouble in school… All of these stories start out like that, the characters are losers, and nobody gets them. Harry Potter is the same way, his adoptive parents make him live under the stairs, but secretly, he’s actually this really powerful wizard. Same thing with Percy Jackson, and the story starts with him at this museum with his class, and he sees this statue with Ancient Greek lettering on it, but the letters rearrange themselves into letters he can read. And his teacher asks if anyone knows who the statue is, and since he can read it, Percy is like – oh, it’s Perseus, blah blah blah…” Sal was starting to get more engaged in his description now. His speaking became more rapid and excited. “Anyway, then people start following him, his teacher is watching him like a hawk, she turns out to be a harpy… Like a real harpy, you know, half-woman, half-bird? But this guy finds him and says, you’re a demigod, like Perseus, you’re the son of Poseidon. And you’re supposed to be a hero, like in the Greek sense. And Percy’s says, no way, I mean, I’m a troublemaker. I’m hyperactive and I’m dyslexic. And the guy says, of course you’re hyperactive, you’re not built to be sitting in boring class, you’re supposed to be out doing heroic labors, and of course you’re dyslexic, you’re not supposed to be reading English, you’re supposed to be reading Ancient Greek, so anyway, he ends up going to this special high school with all of these other demigod kids… It’s the same thing as Harry Potter, it’s almost funny how unoriginal it is. But the thing is, it’s that way because it’s effective. It’s every kid’s fantasy. Every person’s fantasy really. That you live within the wrong world, and eventually someone is going to come along and deliver you out of that world, and all of your faults, or all of the things that make you weird or different will actually be because you’re meant for something greater, and somewhere more important that you can go values those things more than where you are now. You see what I mean, right?”
Mike nodded. He did understand. His fork scraped the empty plate in front of him, and he lifted his napkin to his lips, searching for excess syrup. While Sal told him the plot of the movie, he’d finished everything. He’d barely noticed. He’d even started spearing potatoes off of Sal’s plate, and Sal had subtly pushed his plate closer to Mike, who’s fork moved faster as Sal’s words came faster, until even the potatoes were gone.
“You were hungry,” Sal said. Mike nodded. He felt full, but somehow more than full. He seemed overcapacity, ballooned, and the pleasure of it made his hands shake. Sal’s words, the plot of this movie Mike might never see, pressed against his skin like his fingers, and pushed underneath, massaging the meat, wrapping around his bones, and going further in still, until his words were deep inside, pushing out, growing him from within, doubling him, and Sal was part of him, his voice speaking behind Mike’s ears, and Mike realized this was the feeling he’d been chasing, full of food, yes, stuffed full, but these words filled him further until he had no borders; he was an expanse, without limits, like the universe itself.
Sal leaned across the table now, and lowered his voice. “I know what you want, Mike,” he said, his eyes massaging the contours of Mike’s face. “I suspected it as soon as I heard the guys talking, about the weight you’d put on. But to see you now… This wasn’t an accident.” Mike shifted uncomfortably in the booth; his first instinct was to deny it, but he held his tongue.
“It’s working for you,” Sal continued. “You’re fucking gorgeous, man.”
“Thank you,” Mike said, quietly.
“A real man,” Sal said, smiling now, baring his teeth ever so slightly and running his tongue over their sharp edges. “I don’t think you should stop.” Mike felt his breath get caught in his throat again, sticky with the orange juice and champagne. “I don’t think you want to stop, do you? Go back to how you were before?”
Mike closed his eyes. “No,” he said.
“I can help you.”
Mike opened his eyes, and everything in the restaurant seemed brighter. He had to squint. How long had they been sitting there? It was noon when they’d arrived, but the sun was already moving across the skin of the world, casting light diagonally across the city, bouncing off of the street and into the storefronts and restaurants. It was nearly late afternoon now.
“Help me how?” Mike asked.
“Any way you need so you don’t get lost,” Sal said. “Make sure you’re still eating big. Lifting big. Making sure you know just how beautiful you are… And how beautiful you can be.” Sal grinned, and some of that childlike energy came back. “There are a lot of guys like me, Mike. I’ve got friends you can meet. We all know each other. And they’d love to meet you.”
The waitress came back and removed their plates. Mike watched her go, not because she was particularly interesting, but because he needed to look at someone else, he didn’t want to look back at Sal, his smile scared him and excited him at the same time, moving him too fast even as he sat still. And the food in his stomach felt like it had doubled inside; he thought he was about to explode.
“How… If I’m not going to stop… I mean, eventually I have to stop. Right?”
“If you want.”
“How big do you think I’m going to get?”
“Well, that’s not really up to me, is it?” Sal slid his hand out and held Mike’s hand. Mike looked at Sal’s arm and was surprised to notice that his forearm was almost twice as thick as Sal’s. He squeezed Sal’s hand and watched the muscles in his forearm become continents colliding, raising mount ranges with the flick of his wrist. “It’s up to you,” Sal continued, “how big you get. It’s all about what you want.”
Holding Sal’s hand like that, Mike felt flooded with an image, a prediction of the future, the two of them sitting in a booth like this one, their hands entwined but they were different; Sal’s was the same, perhaps a little older, but Mike’s was different, enormous, his hand dwarfing Sal’s, and up the wrist the muscles flared out, thick like ancient oaks entwined, spread wide apart by shoulders to rival Atlas, and in the middle of them the skin rose to his head and face, a face Mike could barely recognize as his own, framed as it was by muscle, and with his neck swallowed nearly completely by fat, and down the front was his chest, wide and full dividing his shoulders like tectonic plates, sticking out from under his shirt and rising and falling as his lungs breathed love and contentment and sex; but nothing compared to Mike’s gut, which had grown out in all directions, spread out over his legs, filling up every available space, so huge that it was wedged against the table in front of him, and to Mike, finally, he looked like those men he’d watched as a child, he saw it in himself, he saw the possibility, he saw the path, and it lay somewhere here, in Sal’s hands, that were holding his, and when Mike looked back into his eyes he realized that Sal was imagining the same thing.
Mike let go of Sal’s hands. He smiled. “I think I’m still a little hungry,” Mike said, and realized he wasn’t lying. He was already starting to feel hungry, his desire to eat rising from within his stomach faster now than before, faster now that he knew he was about to make an ecstatic leap into the unknown.
“Do you want to order something else?” Sal looked like he was about to signal the waitress.
“We don’t have to stay here,” Mike said.
Sal grinned, wider than ever. “Well… I could make you something back at my place.”
Mike nodded, and they paid their bill. By the time they walked out of the restaurant into the late afternoon, Mike’s stomach was already growling.
