A Weighty Punishment (The Series)- Chapter 1

Hi everybody! As promised, I've created a series of that short story I released a bit ago about a man who's wife is kidnapped and fattened up after he find himself unable to pay off his debts. This story is a bit more dramatic and was definitely very fun to write, and I'm looking forward to releasing more chapters soon! Chapter 1 is available for all fiction tiers, and Chapter 2 is currently available on early release for the Avid Readers+ tiers and up! I really hope you enjoy:)

“It’s not the treatment that’s getting to her,” the silken voice began through the line, pleasant enough yet undercut with the slight crackle of feedback. “Nor is it the conditions, we’re treating your wife well. It's not even the imprisonment itself that’s beginning to drive her mad. It’s the mystery of it all, the seemingly apparent senselessness of this.... situation she’s found herself in. Why is this happening to her? It’s her only question, day in and day out. Why, why why. You know why, don’t you? And would you like the opportunity to tell her?”

Arthur attempted a swallow, his throat devoid of any moisture as it became the instant his cell phone began to buzz with a summons from the ‘unknown caller’ that had become a dreaded element of his daily routine. 

He attempted to croak out a response and found himself unable to eke out more than a sputter, eliciting a deep and seemingly genuine laugh from the party on the other line. 

“It's been nearly a month, Arthur. Still nothing to say? Nothing to show for the time?”

More silence followed and the voice continued, a chuckle poised on the edge of his calm but steel-lined words. 

“I like to think of you as an honorable man Arthur, I really do. Now, I’ve met very few men with your…propensity towards gambling that I'd call truly honorable, and even fewer who’d be willing to let their wife suffer the brunt of the consequences for their actions, but those facts don’t sway my opinion. I feel for you,” the voice assured, authenticity still leaching through his words despite the way reality proved their falsehood. “I truly do, I'm rooting for you. I consider you a good man forced into a bad situation. A good man with some unforgiving habits and unusual interests. Isn't that preferable to the way most would phrase it? Most would call you a cheat. A gambling addict with no means or intentions to pay you debts, a womanizer who’s unfaithful to your wife with the kinds of women you’d rather be with. Wouldn't that be so confusing for poor Becca to hear? Such a beautiful thing. Every man's fantasy. Every normal man, that is. Every man except the few like you, who prefer their women, more….” 

The voice paused, another chuckle rumbling through the line. 

“Of a more ample size, I should say.”

Arthur squeezed his eyes shut, the responsibility and the guilt pressing down on him anew once again, just as potent and as humiliating as it had the first time he’d fielded one of the now daily calls from his new acquaintance. If he was being honest with himself, something he was finding more and more difficult to do in the cool, refreshing face of the denial he now preferred over any objective analysis of his life, that guilt never truly abetted. How could it? He was guilty. Of everything the man had accused him of, and of worse. Of things that didn't concern the organization to which he owed nearly a hundred thousand dollars, but things that certainly concerned him. Would certainly concern his wife, Becca, if she was aware of them. 

Arthur, unlike most addicts, discovered his vice comparatively later in life, and attacked the passion with the aggression and vigor of one looking to make up for lost time. He’d never stepped foot in a casino before the age of 30, his life originally busied by his studies, his courtship with Becca, and eventually the corporate job that dominated his days and shortened his nights with its requirement of rest. He lived in the way he was expected to, was happy in the way he was expected to be, but even then, even before squandering his life savings and his retirement fund, he held secrets from his wife, a woman he truly loved despite the lies he told her. 

Arthur had always been first fascinated, and then enamored, by the soft, inviting curves of overfed women. He’d spent his teenage years searching unpopular, elicit sites that featured the kinds of figures he preferred, and blushing whenever anyone brought up weight or excess fat in real life. He’d never pursued what he considered to be a mortifying, unnatural fetish, but the longer he ignored his deepest desires and inclinations, the more they began to dominate his thoughts. He planned his days around the opportunity to pleasure himself to these kinds of women at night, and even after meeting Becca and falling in what he truly felt to be love with the kind, slender beauty who was the envy of many, he still wouldn't let his f go. He made love to Becca, gripping her slim waist in his greedy palms and feeling her lithe tautness about him, but he pictured the kinds of women he truly wanted to be with, the kinds whose waist he’d never be able to get his hands around, the kind who most would assume would pale in comparison to the conventionally attractive woman that was somehow on his arm. 

He never let Becca know how he felt and was anally careful about the concealment of his taboo vices, but never truly conceded an ounce of the attraction, never truly allowed for there to be any room in the deepest part of his heart for any love but the one of his youth. He and Becca built a beautiful life together, a life he should’ve been happy with, but dissatisfaction crept in slowly but steadily. 

He wanted more. More to do, more to feel, more than a banal commute to a sterile office and a sex life built on a foundation of falsehoods and unspoken fantasies. He wanted more than Becca, more woman. Much like the disturbingly alluring voice on the phone, he too once considered himself an honorable man, at least to a degree. He always believed that infidelity was outside the realms of possibility for him, that he was a good person who would never be able to betray someone he loved in that manner. He convinced himself of this despite evidence suggesting otherwise, evidence like the hours upon hours he spent on the darker corners of the internet, the hundreds of dollars he’d spent on illicit content and meals for the blubbery, scantily clad women that he thought of whenever he was with Becca. 

Things began to devolve, his goodness degrading and becoming speckled with rusty red holes of further and further deceit, until he crossed a line. It began as all things do, explicable, understandable, forgivable, but he knew even in sending the very first message, a seemingly benign compliment to one of the women he spent the most time admiring. He was well aware of the slope on which he’d begun to slip. A few messages became conversations, which became daily chats and numbers exchanged, all the while sending her funds that he should’ve been saving, should've been using to better his life with Becca. His real life. 

He was consumed, entirely, but he was also torn asunder by his own sensibilities, fully aware that what he was doing more than fit the bill of an emotional affair. It was horrendous and unforgivable and somehow more perverse than a physical one. More intimate, more of a dagger to the back of the perfect wife who’d cared for him since he was a younger man. He cut things off once the temptation to arrange a rendezvous became too overpowering, but he mourned the loss of that relationship, of that secret, like a death. He felt gutted, hollowed, alone in his own self reckonings and devoid of anything that could bring him true pleasure. He felt he was staring down a future in which nothing would ever feel as good as sharing 3 am fantasies with a beautifully overfed woman he’d never met, and he fell into a depression brought about by what he could describe as nothing else but hopelessness. 

He felt utterly hopeless, and nothing could console him. Not his beautiful, attentive wife who was growing more and more concerned about his listlessness, who doted on him endlessly in an effort to restore him to the semi-chipper man she’d married. Not his career, certainly not a thrilling one, but one that provided for himself and his family well, one that had plenty of room for upward mobility if he’d only apply himself. He fell away from his few hobbies, fell away from his friendships and acquaintances, and isolated himself into an uninviting shell of his own self-imposed misery, becoming a husk of himself for no reason other than desires gone unfilled. 

He began to feel destructive. To try things just for the sake of them, to engage in what he knew he shouldn't in order to feel something. He started small, picking up a smoking habit much to Becca's chagrin, but escalated as he realized that distraction was as much of a life as he felt he could expect to have. The cigarettes became frequent drinking (although Arthur truly didn't have the constitution for drunkenness and typically found himself bleary-eyed and vomiting each time he attempted to push past the realms of tipsiness), and finally, the two vices found a way to both converge on one another while also adding to their ranks: the casino. It was a place where he wouldn't be judged for spending mindless hours. A place that allowed indoor smoking, served strong, cheap drinks as a means of enticement to spend more, to risk more, and best of all, he discovered a new thrill that felt almost as delicious as his hours spent talking to Cherry, the impossibly busty, lard coated woman for which he’d fallen. 

He enjoyed the uncertainty, enjoyed the oscillation of devastating losses and improbable wins, and found himself spending more and more time at the local casino, conveniently located far enough away from his home that it often made the most sense to spend the night. Grand Gold was open 24 hours, and the pulsating bright lights allowed him the exact dissonance he required to ignore how many hours he’d spent there and how much money he’d spent as well. 

One concession of his character begat another, and another, and eventually, in his state of near-perpetual intoxication, he found himself once again engaged in his tryst with cherry. He texted her one late night at the casino, nearly drunk enough to think of the summons as a good idea, and she’d met him there, arriving in a skintight dress that showed off every juicy roll and dimple of fat that he’d spent hours drooling over, her tubby high heeled feet and thick thighs forcing a waddle that made her entire body undulate wildly as she approached him. He felt she looked like an angel in that moment, a savior who would rescue him from the state he’d fallen into, who would relieve him of the feeling that his life wasn't his own, that his choices had been forced by an outside hand. 

He’d been speechless, which had amused Cherry endlessly, and after several more drinks, they found themselves in the casino's hotel enjoying the taste of the drinks on each other's tongues as he began the dalliance that officially separated him from everything he once thought himself to be. The next morning he’d felt sick with guilt and the next night, he’d begged her to return. It happened over and over again, his desperation to feel her soft flesh beneath his hands capturing his mind more fully than his quickly formed addiction to cigarettes and gambling, more than the problem with alcohol that he refused to acknowledge he was beginning to have. 

He didn't know Cherry. Not truly, no matter how deeply he felt she was the only person in the world that truly knew him. He wasn’t naive in his stupidity. He knew Cherry was likely a fake name, knew even more truly that Cherry likely wouldn't have continued to see him if it weren’t for the funds he’d been providing her with since they first began to chat online. But he convinced himself easily enough that it was love. 

Watching her fleshy body jiggle hypnotically as she slipped out of the evening's selection of lingerie was enough to allow him to believe it was love. More than enough. The way her skin felt under his lips, skin he could be sure he had kissed and licked every inch of, was more than enough to allow him to believe it was love, true love. The truest he’d ever known. He never thought of Becca in those moments. It was becoming more and more rare that he thought of her afterwards either. And all the while, she stuck by him. 

Becca never confronted him, never judged him, and never asked the kinds of questions that any woman in her position had more than the right to know. Where was he spending his evenings? Why did he return so late reeking of cheap alcohol and the cigarettes he promised her he’d cut back on? And most pressingly of all, how much money was he losing?

Arthur was smart about the money, at least as it pertained to Becca. He didn't allow himself to dip too far into his regular income except for the cash and money transfers he was constantly providing for Cherry, and with paychecks still frequently arriving and household bills and necessities always accounted for, Becca had no reason to suspect just how much of a hole Arthur was digging himself into. 

He went for their retirement accounts first, draining it within the first 6 months, but the amount of time and money he’d spent at the casino had earned him a reputation of sorts, provided him with perks and trust not afforded to any old patron. He began to borrow against things that the casino deemed valuable enough, first his car, then Becca's car, and then, most irrationally, their quaint, well-loved three-bedroom with the brick mortar and Becca's small garden in the backyard. 

Nothing ever came of his losses. He would be up, and then down, and then up again, and the casino continued to let him play, to test his luck against the dice and the cards as often as his heart desired. But as all things do, his adoration of the risk caught up to him, running right over him and passing him by. After 3 months of posting nothing but losses, three months of the worst luck that he knew would change if he could just play one more round, the casino was ready to collect upon its debts.

The amount he owed was staggering, and terrifying. He didn't know how to get himself out of this situation, but what he did know was that Becca could never discover the depths of it, could never discover the way he’d needlessly and senselessly destroyed their lives for what amounted in the end, to nothing.