Like Mother, Like Daughters (14)

New LMLD, hot off the presses! Some light intox and messy eating in this one.

There will be a new poll up for the next installment, so get ready to decide our leading ladies' futures (and figures) once again.

Also, Patreon made a bunch of updates to the site and the app. If you use the phone app, it now has a kind of Discord-style chat where you can chat with me and other patrons. I don't have any big plans for the feature at this point except maybe posting some of the silly things I usually post over on deviantart that I don't want to make a whole new post for on here, but I'm happy to make more use of it if it's something folks are interested in! 

***

“And then to have her totally hijack our whole vacation?” Claire said, swallowing a large bite of barbecued rib and licking sauce from the corner of her mouth. “It’s bullshit.” She tore into another rib, ripping all the tender meat from the bone in one swift motion. She hardly chewed it at all, gulping it down and tossing the bare bone aside before reaching for another.

“Yeah,” Minnie managed to wheeze. They’d been eating for over an hour, and Minnie had hit her limit. Even though the dress she’d borrowed from Claire had given her plenty of room at the start, her stomach was now straining beneath it. Leaned back in her chair like she was, the bright purple and orange fabric clung to the overstuffed curve of her gut, the hollow of her bellybutton puckering the front of the dress. She’d unconsciously spread her legs to give her stomach room to hang down and expand, but she’d eaten herself so round it hardly made a difference. “Bull—uuurp—shit, for… hh… for sure.” She was having trouble forming words. She’d had a few (okay, many) pints of beer while they ate, and now she was drunk on both beer and too much food, bubbles of carbonation gurgling in her stomach alongside more dishes than she cared to count.

Claire looked similarly puffed up, though it was clear that she was nowhere close to stopping her fury-fueled binge. Her hands, face, and clothes were covered in all manner of sauces, grease, and the precious few crumbs Claire hadn’t managed to shove down her gullet. She’d long since pushed her elastic shorts—stretchy, but not stretchy enough to handle this degree of stuffing—under the hang of her belly, and her tank top had begun to ride up its curve. She’d gotten angrier every time she had to tug it back down and eventually gave up, even knowing her belly was getting more exposed as she continued to gorge. Pfft—like that even mattered. It wasn’t like everyone couldn’t tell she was fat already. So what if she showed a little skin?

She finished the last of her full rack of ribs and licked the left-behind sauce off her fingers—the kind of unladylike behavior she usually avoided, especially in public, but was allowing in this moment because goddammit she was busy making up for all the time she’d wasted on Veronica’s ridiculous fitness outings.

She considered ending her repast there. She’d made a good go of it. This was, what, her third entree? She’d lost count of the sides she’d gulped down. And the drinks… the waitress had taken away her empty glasses, but she’d tried at least four different frozen drinks, sucking down corn syrup and liquor like it was her job. There might’ve been more, but who wanted to try and count?

She took stock of herself. Her usually flabby belly had gone taut, at least above her bellybutton. Her skin itched a little with the stretching. The bottom of her belly squished across her soft lap, looking somehow juicier than usual. Her whole gut was pressed up against the edge of the table. She was tipsy enough that she was worried about pushing back her chair; she had a feeling she’d just wind up tipping back onto the floor.

Shit. Veronica was right. She really had turned into a hog. No—more than that, now. An elephant, or maybe a whale. Sloshed as she was, that made her laugh to herself, her anger finally seeming to lift away. So what if her prissy older sister thought she was huge? She was huge, and had no complaints about it.

She looked across the table at Minnie, whose hands cradled her bloat-hardened middle. Minnie still had the dubious designation of “thinnest Emple sister,” but after this meal, that wasn’t saying much. Unlike Claire, who simply looked fatter now that she was stuffed, Minnie was so round she looked pregnant. Having boobs bigger than her head and struggling to be contained by the neckline of her borrowed dress only enhanced the effect. Minnie gave a loud belch. “Ooh… I think that just made some room.”

“Good, ‘cause I think our next course is here,” Claire sang, doing a little dance in her seat. Minnie groaned a little, struggling to sit upright again.

Their waitress appeared, holding a pot pie large enough to serve a family, a basket of chili cheese fries, and another round of drinks. She set the pot pie and a tall, sweet drink in front of Claire and another pint of beer and the huge basket of fries in front of Minnie. “Just let me know if you need anything else,” she chirped, eyes lingering a little too long on both bloated sisters.

“Will do!” Claire answered with a drunken grin, already picking up her fork.

Despite their painful fullness, both girls couldn’t help themselves. They were so wasted that everything tasted good. Each bite sat heavier in their bellies than the last, but they gobbled onward, alcohol dulling their sense of how full they were. But at least Claire didn’t feel mad anymore.

“You gotta try a bite,” she insisted as she pushed the nearly empty pie dish across the table, liminally aware of how difficult it was to lean forward to do so. And were her arms always this heavy? “It’s almost as good as Momma’s,” she insisted.

Minnie hiccuped once, twice. “I don’t think I should…” She ferried a handful of fries into her mouth. “I’m really full,” she added through a bulging mouthful of fries.

“It’s just a little! C’mon, you gotta try some so you can tell Momma she’s a better chef than whoever cooks here.”

Minnie swallowed and whined. “Fine.” She took a bite. Claire was right: the pie was good—creamy filling, buttery crust that was just the right amount of chewy and crispy, a little sweet… but their mother’s was still better. No wonder Momma wound up so big, she thought as she mindlessly finished the last two bites and then dug back into her last few fries. She counted herself lucky that she had a better metabolism, still oblivious to just how many pounds she’d added to her frame in a few short weeks.

“Good, right?”

“Mhm,” Minnie grunted.

The waitress came by again. “Anything else you’d like?” she asked, voice tinged with hope that neither Claire nor Minnie was capable of noticing.

Minnie’s mouth was too full to reply, and she felt a little sick as Claire asked, “What do you have for dessert?”

***

“And I was just trying to help, you know?” Veronica mourned to the bartender. “And she just, like, totally attacked me.”

Unlike her sisters, Veronica hadn’t bothered with food. She’d spent her afternoon at the quietest, most out of the way bar on the ship getting completely hammered. She’d also spent the entire time trying to tell the bartender what happened in a way that didn’t make her sound deranged, but no matter how many times she tried to tell it or how much liquor she tried to lubricate herself with, she couldn’t.

Which only made her want to drink more.

She just couldn’t untie the knots in her brain. She couldn’t understand how Claire had made her peace with being fat. Both her sisters’ figures were shocking—unrecognizably bloated, and getting noticeably bigger with every day they spent on this trip. She could understand Minnie being in complete denial—that was Veronica’s usual solution. But being in such close proximity to both of them and realizing how much her own appetite had grown, and just how much damage her job had done to her waistline… it meant denial was no longer an option.

She wobbled out of the bar and back to their cabin, grateful that she was alone and that the sheets were cool. She took a deep breath, eyes blinking slowly closed. She admitted to herself, silently, that she was fat. She nearly started to cry.

Unlike Claire, who had come to understand that “fat” was merely a body type, Veronica thought of fat as an entire personality and way of being. Her logic seemed sound: once, she’d been fit. She’d liked exercising and had excelled at using her body to complete complex feats of athleticism. The core of her identity was Being An Athlete. And now the core of her identity was… god, she didn’t even really know. Her job was eating and writing about food. She hadn’t gotten any new hobbies to replace soccer, other than eating and promising herself she would diet (as if either of those were real hobbies). Her sense of herself was as flabby and atrophied as her middle.

Following this line of thinking, it was no mystery why Veronica refused to call herself or anyone else “fat” with anything approaching neutrality. To admit to fatness was to admit that she’d lost control not only of her appetite, but of her entire self, every trait subsumed by blubber. And yet here she was, finally acknowledging reality.

She rolled onto her back, grimacing as every bit of her wobbled into place. She put her hands on her belly, throat tightening with a sob as her palms sank into inches of soft flesh. She gripped at her middle tightly, hard enough that it hurt, the anger she’d been pointing towards her sisters finally turning inward. She moved her hands roughly down to her thighs, pinching and squeezing until she was certain she’d bruise herself.

She tried to punish herself by remembering exactly how she’d gotten so big. She ordered herself to remember every meal, every extra office donut and late-night slice of pizza and sweet drink. How terrible to realize that she couldn’t. She could recall some highlights, the broad strokes of her habits over the last few years, but she was shocked to realize how much she couldn’t remember. Worst of all, she’d had to write thousands of words about quite a few of her meals, and she couldn’t remember the subjects of most of her reviews.

At first, she attempted to soothe herself: she was drunk, and even if she wasn’t, how was she supposed to recall everything she’d eaten every day for however long? But her anger swiftly returned. It didn’t matter if she was drunk. If she hadn’t been glutting herself at every opportunity, she was certain she would’ve remembered. She gave her belly a hard slap, almost gagging as it jiggled. She’d traded her pro athlete body for this, and all for food that wasn’t even tasty enough to be remembered.

There was only so long she could think about how angry she was with herself, and it didn’t take much longer for her to completely tire herself out. She conked out so hard she didn’t even hear Minnie and Claire return, both groaning under the heavy load of enough lunch to stock a buffet as they crawled into their respective beds to digest their heaviest binge yet.