Stepfordized: Part 12

Kelsey rolled out of bed in a hot funk as the sun trickled in through the window. The night had been miserable for her. Nothing she did made her comfortable, and no amount of stretching could get rid of the pain in her back. She spent a large portion of time getting up and walking over to adjust the thermostat when she felt hot only to have to get up and do it again when she was shivering half an hour later. She’d tried to compromise by just leaving the AC completely off in hopes that the temperature would moderate itself into a happy middle ground but it just got hot again, albeit more slowly than before. Sweaty and groggy, Kelsey looked over at her phone and saw that she had been laying awake from 10PM to 9:13AM. Despite getting no sleep, she still managed to lay in bed far longer than she’d wanted to and could no longer justify continuing to fester in her own sweat and misery.

With matted hair still sticking to her back and the grommets on her camisole clearly indented into her reddened skin, Kelsey dragged herself into the shower to refresh herself before class. It had been a little over two weeks since the party and Kelsey still hadn’t mustered the courage to confront Lihua about what Charlotte had told her while she was gone. It didn’t make sense really. How did Charlie know if Lihua was in a relationship or not? She had plenty of nasty things to say about her otherwise, but still seemed like she wanted to sound like the authority on her despite only having one Communications class with her and yoga. But why would she lie about something like that? Kelsey rubbed shampoo into her lengthening hair, appreciating it’s increased fullness since arriving in town. She’d heard about the so-called “Stepford Effect” from Ahanu, but didn’t subscribe to it as a real thing outside of local culture rubbing off on everyone over time. Plus, Ahanu herself was now dating the exact polar opposite of a domesticated mother and trophy wife. The realization only made her more upset.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t exactly NOT fair either, she reasoned, but it still upset her that her friend and neighbor was not only also bisexual, but was able to get a good looking girlfriend while Kelsey was wrestling with whether or not her own diamond in the rough was actually hiding a relationship from her. She knew that Lihua said that she might have had something to do that night, but she never sent any messages saying she wasn’t going to make it until a few hours after Kelsey had already been upset and drinking at the party……And by then she was already plastered and having her brains fucked out by Dylan who was actually surprisingly skilled in bed. She still found him abhorrent and hideously nerdy, but she had to give credit where it was due: He had a big dick and was decently good at using it.

Kelsey finished washing and then conditioning her hair before toweling off and throwing on some underwear. She didn’t have to leave for a while and the cool air felt good on her freshly shower-boiled skin as she glided through the house with steam still floating off of her while she made herself a carb-packed breakfast consisting of two English muffins with an egg and bacon piled on both with a blueberry muffin and orange juice on the side. The food went down quickly, but her guilt began to mount again. She was stress eating and she knew it. She was fucked no matter which way things went with Lihua. If she was really just setting her up to cheat on a secret boyfriend, it would never work out on principal. If she wasn’t dating someone, Kelsey now had to admit to Lihua that she’d had gotten so upset that she didn’t come to the party that she got shitfaced and had sex with the annoyingly smug wannabe intellectual from the public community college out of jealousy at the thought that Lihua might have already had a boyfriend. Only now did she ask herself questions like “Why didn’t I just ask her via text?” or “Why didn’t I just wait? Why didn’t I call her?”

She felt the fullness of her stomach and took a breath. Even after eating all of that food, she still felt like she could eat more. Had she more time she might have, but the clock ticked away her free morning bit by bit. She caught a hint of her reflection in the mirror and posed a little, taking note of her figure as she pressed her hand to her hip and shifted from side to side. She didn’t look fat, per se, but Kelsey could tell that her body was looking wider than it used to and her belly seemed to push out just a little more than it previously had the month prior. Kelsey shook herself out of her distraction and resolved to get dressed and prepare to see Lihua again on campus, stealing one last glance at herself before resolving to try and go a little lighter on meals for a while before she started really gaining weight.

(1)

All throughout her classes Kelsey grew increasingly anxious. She wanted so desperately to be around the very person she was afraid to talk to that she all but completely zonef out on the lecture She knew that Professor Kate had started with telling everyone to eat multiple times a day to speed up metabolism, but judging by the slowly burgeoning waistlines of her classmates, she didn’t think they were getting the proper take on what they should be doing in terms of food. Even if the advice was sound at face value, but something about being told by a 600 pound woman to eat more made it seem less worth it to try and listen to whatever she had to say on the subject. Instead, she spent the time rehearsing what she wanted to ask and how when she inevitably ran into Lihua again after class.

The two of them had continued to speak, though it had become apparent that Kelsey was distancing herself a little. Lihua had expressed concern several times, asking if everything was okay and pointing out that her new “friend” had seemed out of sorts and distracted lately. Kelsey insisted over and over that she was just tired and that there was nothing to worry about, but she knew full well that her yoga instructor-turned-romantic interest was bothered by the sudden distance between them. In her hesitance to communicate her worries, Kelsey had been unaffectionate and visibly less flirtatious when the two college girls hung out, leaving Lihua looking hopeful and supportive, but sad and disappointed by the end each time they spent together. If she didn’t do something soon, Kelsey thought, she was going to lose her before the two of them ever had a chance to become more than just gal pals at a women’s college.

The bell rang and the students all began to leave while Kelsey sat stuck in place, terrified at the notion that soon she was going to have to put her nonexistent relationship on the line in multiple different ways before she could feel safe. She picked up her backpack and slung it over her shoulder before halfheartedly returning Professor Kate’s sweet finger waggle goodbye and walking out of the door. Her heart raced, threatening to break through her ribs with how hard it beat against it’s confines as Kelsey wandered closer to the grassy area where Lihua ran her yoga class. When she got close enough to their usual spot she noticed that several students had already gathered and were going through the normal warm up stretches, but Lihua herself was nowhere to be seen. Confused, Kelsey spun around in place, her anxiety turning to nausea as she did. Kelsey closed her eyes and hung her head for a moment in an attempt to center herself and calm her nerves for a moment, but when she opened her eyes, she saw a stunning Asian woman sauntering towards her while looking over at the crowd.

Kelsey’s breath caught at the sight of her. Lihua rarely wore makeup and even then, the only time Kelsey had seen it was at Mrs. Grant’s fancy garden party where she was in tasteful makeup and a cute dress. Now she stood in thick eyeliner and a pair of jeans that hugged a set of hips that Kelsey was certain were smaller when they’d first met. The majority of her was still fit and slim looking, but Kelsey was absolutely certain that Lihua had put on some weight almost entirely in her hips. Even so, her increased curvaceousness and ruby red lips coupled with dark eyeliner and straight goth-black Asian hair practically stopped Kelsey dead on sight. For a moment, there was no heartbeat. No breath. No thoughts, and indeed no brain activity. Only the idiotic, slack-jawed gawking of a stupefied college girl mesmerized by the overwhelming presence known to Kelsey only as “THE GAY.”

(2)

Lihua was stupendously gorgeous in Kelsey’s eyes. So much so in fact, that the lovestruck brunette didn’t even think twice about her walking over until she started speaking.

“Heyy.” She purred sweetly, her voice taking on a flirtatious but concerned tone. “Could we maybe talk for a minute?”

Kelsey felt like the moon had been dropped on her head. Her stomach ran cold and hundreds of incoherent, rambling statements about dying all ran through her head at once. She gulped and nodded, nearly sweating in fear.

“Hey, are you alright? This isn’t meant to be like a bad thing. Sorry if I scared you.” Lihua said in a sweet but pointedly casual voice.

It was meant to ease Kelsey’s nerves and it did a little. Kelsey managed to catch her breath before Lihua continued.

“Soo…..I guess….Oh god, now *I* feel nervous.” She chuckled.

“It’s just….Do I feel like you’ve been kind of….less happy to be around me lately? And like maybe you’re avoiding me and not returning my texts?

…..Or even opening them so that I don’t see that you saw them when we were texting all the time before all this so I know you look at your phone every five seconds?

It’s just that like…….I kinda thought we had a thing going? And maybe that we were gonna…kinda…..be like….a thing?” Lihua asked nervously, interlacing her fingers for emphasis.

“Oh. Oh! Well yeah, we totally did. Like seriously. DO! We still do! I mean, I still do. So. Uhhh. Yeah……That.” Kelsey babbled until she ran out of both momentum and eloquence.

“Well…I mean….I love that and all, but now I need to ask…did I do something? Why have you been so distant? Was it because I didn’t go to Dylan’s party with you?” Lihua asked pleadingly.

Kelsey was quiet for a moment. Now that she thought about it, she was pretty angry that Lihua didn’t go with her, but she knew that that was just irrational jealousy and not anything Lihua had actually done wrong. It was simply an inconvenient time for Kelsey to realize that she had been being unfairly angry for not getting her way and had been, on some small level, punishing Lihua for it. That did not make her feel great.

“You didn’t do anything wrong at all. I actually wanted that night to be when we….became a thing. So I was kinda butthurt about it, but you had warned me you might be somewhere else. Buuuut….Someone had told me that you were actually off at your boyfriend’s house for the weekend. Which would mean that anything we did was both lying to me and cheating on whoever your boyfriend was.

I didn’t necessarily believe that this person was right, but it did upset me. A lot. I tried to just ask you about it but I was so afraid that I was going to ruin a possible….romantic relationship with you…That um…I just kept quiet. By then I couldn’t get it out of my head and I was sort of trying to mitigate damage while I tried to figure out if it was true or not.

But like, I didn’t like spy on you or anything….So you know.”

Lihua looked at Kelsey with a quizzical scowl for a moment before her expression became a happy one.

“Well, thank you for being so considerate of my relationships, but uhh…I’m afraid I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment. But I am on the market for a relationship~.”

Kelsey smiled, and then immediately remembered that she still had to get through round two before she was safe. She sighed and steeled herself before beginning, conscious of the nearby yoga class hearing her.

“So…Before we can be anything…I feel like I need to start out honestly and confess something I’m not proud of.” Kelsey said, shaking.

Lihua looked surprised, but compassionate.

“Oh! Well…Uhh….Okay then. What happened?” She asked.

Kelsey shifted nervously.

“So…At the party….When I had heard that you were with your boyfriend instead of me…I started drinking really heavily? And I was angry and upset and felt really abandoned and unloved. So….Since I wasn’t in a relationship with you, I….ended up having sex with Dylan. We used protection and all that and we’re not together, but yeah….that happened..”

“Wait, what?” Lihua asked blankly.

“You…Wait. Okay, so you were so nervous about me sleeping with someone else that you figured you would go fuck some dude about it? Why would you do that? Do you even like him?” Lihua asked incredulously.

She was clearly not taking the confession well and it was making Kelsey start to panic.

“I mean we also weren’t even together, so I figured it’d be okay.” Kelsey blurted out, the words like corrosive vomit.

Lihua’s eyes widened in surprise and anger. “What the fuck? You thought it’d be okay? So you even thought about it. About ME even!”

“I….don’t see how that’s a bad thing that I thought about you…” Kelsey defended confusedly.

“It’s bad because after you thought about it, you still had sex with Dylan!” Lihua snapped.

Both girls instantly regretted their volume as the yoga students were all beginning to turn their ears to the drama.

“I understand.” Kelsey said in a quieter tone. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. Nothing is coming out right. I’m sorry for what I did and I knew I had to tell you. This is me attempting to be honest from the start.”

Lihua stood and stared for a moment before closing her eyes and rubbing the sides of her head.

“Nooooooo….” She groaned.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Please don’t do this to me. I want so bad for you to not be evil or crazy. Please don’t be awful.”

Kelsey didn’t have words to respond with, so she just watched as her eyes filled with tears.

“Tell you what….” Lihua said slowly, composing herself. “Give me…Some time. Like…Now *I* might need a couple weeks, I don’t know. Just…Give me some time to cool off and come down and….And just think. It’s not a no and I don’t hate you. I just need time.”

Kelsey was dumbfounded. She had no idea how to respond, and every time she tried, the words gurgled in her throat. It took everything in her power to muster the word “Okay” up as an offering.

Lihua was visibly trying not to cry as she leaned back to preserve her eyeliner.

“I’ll um…I’ll text you. Sooner than later. So…Yeah. I just need time.” Lihua said, already walking away in a huff.

Kelsey stood in place, unable to do anything but cry. She knew that her own stupidity had potentially ruined a chance to be with the most gorgeous woman she’d ever met. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember why she thought sex with Dylan Harper of all people was a good way to finish off an already shitty night. With nothing else to do, she forced herself to resist the urge to follow Lihua anyways after she asked for space and instead walked the opposite direction home. As she trudged past the yoga class, her face burned with the knowledge that half the class was side-eyeing her as she walked by. Charlie was in attendance but her eyes were closed and her attention focused, though Kelsey was almost certain that she had heard it too based on the almost smug expression on her face.

Even in her angry self loathing, Charlotte’s appearance was enough to make Kelsey do a double-take. Her pale marshmallow belly poured out of her yoga pants, but at this point, Charlie had lost enough weight that she was comfortable exposing her flabby stomach during yoga. Her hair too now had an attractive blue streak in it that gave her a sort of Cruella DeVille aesthetic. It was altogether not a bad look, but the manipulative drama geek’s sly half-smile screamed that she had heard and was pleased with the outcome.

(3)

With nothing else to do, Kelsey walked home, making sure to stop by the local pastry shop along the way.