Kinktober 2022 #16: Denial

In her mind’s eye, Bev looked just the same as she had in high school. Oh, sure, it had been twenty years and she’d had four kids since then, but at the end of the day, she was still the same gal!

In reality, Bev had become an overblown MILF. Hips for days, a rack to die for, and a nice potbelly right between them, courtesy of a lifestyle more marked by baking cookies and shuttling her kids around their suburban neighborhood than at the gym or swimming laps.

Somehow, the additional fifty pounds had entirely escaped her notice. Thanks to vanity sizing at clothing stores and an existing preference for tight clothes, Bev was generally squeezed into clothes that accentuated her figure. She was somehow so enamored by the excess of cleavage she was able to show off that it never occurred to her to notice when her shirts showcased her sizeable muffintop and soft belly.

For years, whenever she had to dress nicely for an event, her husband had tried to gently nudge her toward clothes that actually fit her. Showed a little less of all the jiggle she’d accumulated. Hid how pudgy she’d become. But she’d  always brushed it off, insisting he was just worried someone might ogle her. “I only have eyes for you, baby, don’t you worry,” she would tell him. He’d given up at a certain point. If his wife wanted to wear a skintight dress that she was spilling out of in every direction, he would no longer make it his business, even if it was a little embarrassing. He did find her lovely, but he also had a sense of decorum, and a chubby woman nearly in her forties looking like a sausage about to burst out of her short sheath dress was almost too much to bear.

She also had a baffling habit of insisting that she was “dieting.” She could diet talk for days with pretty much anyone. She was up on all the latest tips and tricks for staying slim, and would extol the virtues of any diet she was currently claiming to be on, especially to any of her friends who she considered fat. (Many of them were, invariably, far thinner than she was.) “Oh, I’ve been drinking apple cider vinegar every day for months now, and it’s just doing wonders for my figure!” she would say, completely missing the confused looks on people’s faces as they eyed her doughy backside and love handles. Bev was, of course, never dieting. She just liked having something to talk about, and it seemed like one of the easiest topics of conversation. At the same time, she would’ve told you that even though she wasn’t on a diet, per se, she was very careful about what she ate. Nevermind that she hadn’t counted a calorie or been concerned about the carb or fat content of anything she put in her mouth once in her life. Somehow, only eating a quarter of every other batch of sweets she made for her family and other such habits were enough for her to believe she had restraint.

But it was the night that she drunkenly decided to try on her wedding dress that should’ve made it clear she was missing something. She’d finished a bottle and a half of wine and a whole bowl of buttery popcorn by herself while she and her husband snuggled on the couch and watched a movie. During the wedding scene at the end, she’d paused the movie and jumped up. “Oh my god, babe, don’t you think I’d look so good in my wedding dress?”

Her husband cringed internally, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “Sweetie, it’s okay, I’d much rather just cuddle up with you right now. You don’t need to play dress-up to know you’re beautiful.”

She was already halfway up the stairs and heading straight to their bedroom, giggling. Her husband sighed and got up from the couch, dragging himself upstairs to follow her. He worried that this would be the moment when she finally had to confront her current size. He’d never been quite sure if she was just pretending not to know and faking to herself that she was still thin, or if she genuinely had no idea that she’d plumped up. How she didn’t see it as she stripped down to her underwear was a mystery to him.

As he watched her pull her wedding dress from the closet and removed it from its plastic garment bag, he braced himself. His wife had always been supremely confident, and he worried this might be a huge blow to her self-esteem.

She soldiered on, though, unzipping the back of the dress and stepping right into it. Her husband held his breath. He’d known she wouldn’t fit, but the fact that she was struggling to pull it on and meeting resistance at the thigh was torture. She pushed forward, somehow squeezing the waistband of the skirt past her pudgy ass. It was a sleeveless, strapless dress, which should’ve made it easier. But that meant she was about to ask a dreaded question: “Hon, could you help zip me up?”

His hands shook as he reached for the zipper. The gap at the back was pushed so wide he knew he’d be lucky if he could get it to go up even an inch. He tried to pull the sides of the dress together with one hand as he tried to pull the zipper up with the other. It wouldn’t budge, no matter how much pressure he put on it. “Huh, the zipper didn’t seem like it had anything wrong with it when I pulled it down,” she said thoughtlessly. He suppressed a sigh of frustration. He kept pulling and tugging.

Finally, he asked, very gently, “Maybe suck in a little?”

“Pff, like I need to suck in to fit into my own wedding dress!” she laughed. But she did anyway, and he was able to get the zipper up a whole half inch. But right after that, he gave the zipper another tug, and the entire thing came apart.

He grimaced. “Um. It’s busted, sweetie.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Oh, dammit.” Out of habit, she added, “Must’ve shrunk in the wash,” even though her dress had only been dry-cleaned once decades prior and absolutely hadn’t shrunk just sitting in the closet. Her husband almost barked out a laugh at that. “Oh well. It would’ve been fun to dress up, but I guess you can’t expect a cheap wedding dress to hold up after so many years, huh?”

He couldn’t believe it. She’d not only said the dress had shrunk, but was now saying a garment that cost several thousand dollars had somehow deteriorated in their closet after a mere two decades? She didn’t seem to give it another thought, working the dress down her thick ass and thighs without seeming to notice just how much resistance she was getting.

It was something of a revelation to him to have it confirmed that she really, truly did not see herself as she was. No matter what reality threw at her, in her mind’s eye she was still as slim as she was before four pregnancies and years of eating just as she liked with the constantly slowing metabolism of an adult.

But it wasn’t his problem to solve. And, though her delusion did occasionally inconvenience him, he had to wonder: was it even really a problem for her to believe that? It hadn’t impeded her so far.

For Bev’s part, she had already moved on, tossing the dress into a corner and taking a mental note to donate it to Goodwill before heading back downstairs to polish off the rest of her second bottle of red and maybe a slice of the spice cake she had sitting in the fridge.