~BBW, Eating Romance, ~SWG - a slight accident brings on a whole new view of life
As soon as she landed on the floor after vaulting she knew something was wrong. Seriously wrong. Her right foot was yelping with pain. There was nothing she could do to stop herself crumpling up onto the ground, rubbing the ankle where the pain was centred.
“Abby, Abby, are you alright?” The voices of the gymnastic coach and others in the athletics studio clustered around her. Hands reached out.
“I think so. I just landed badly.” I hope so, that's what she meant.
“Don't try to get up,” coach Ed said. “This could be serious.”
She didn't need reminding. Her ankles, she knew, were her weak point: in the ten years that she'd been training seriously as a gymnast she'd needed operations on both of them to bind fractured bones. And here she was, back on the floor, damaged again, pain shooting out.
She was 18, just beginning her senior year at Sonja Henie High, adulthood stretching ahead. A gymnastics scholarship at college, maybe; further years of training and competing, enjoying the sport that had been her whole life, more or less, ever since she was taken to gymnastics classes as a five year-old kid, tumbling around, grinning prettily through a blaze of brown hair. And now what?
She was taken to hospital. X-rays were taken. Delicate fingers felt around. The injury's bark, she was eventually told, was worse than its bite. It was a hair fracture. Time and rest would heal it. But was it wise to keep putting her ankles at risk? What did she want, a lifetime of hobbling?
“Think about this seriously, Abby,” her father said, back from whatever he did at the office, as they talked in Fellowship, Pennsylvania, where Sonja Henie, Norwegian Olympics skater and movie star of the 1930s, had once stayed over during an exhibition tour to have her skates mended. “I know gymnastics has been your life, but --." Her mother said the same thing.
Abby thought of the thrill of winning prizes, achieving a goal, fulfilling potential. Gymnastics had ruled every aspect of her existence: the hours of training, first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon; the absence of any fun time with family and school friends; and always the strict dieting, essential to keep her body steady at 102 lbs, lean, muscular and tiny, a 26-inch waist, breasts scarcely begun. A strong and beautiful fighting machine. For several nights she squirreled herself away in her room, sometimes staring at the ceiling, other times focussing on the trophies, photographs and pennants scattered on shelves and walls.
Then one day she came down to breakfast, exhausted and gray. Mother stood at the coffee percolator; her father sat with the business section; elder sister Josie, not yet flown the nest and currently working in a canine beauty shop, was inspecting her nails. They looked up, expectant.
“I've made a decision,” Abby said, the voice slow, the tone grave. Before she said another word she burst into tears.
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“If giving up gymnastics means sitting in a shoebox and watching crappy movies like that, then I may have to have a re-think. That was truly awful!” They had just seen “Not Another Teen Movie.”
“Well, my dear,” said Josie, in her usual loud spirits, “that's what movies are like now.”
Back from their jaunt to the multiplex, the sisters were seated around the kitchen table, enjoying late-night milk and cookies. “They're not like “Bambi” any more,” she pressed on. “You're probably surprised movies talk.”
“Come on, I haven't been a hermit. I know I've been preoccupied with sports,” Abby said, reaching for her second chocolate cookie, “but you talk as though I've just returned from another planet.”
Josie was being exasperating, yet she didn't really mind; when had she had the time before to play at family jousting?
“OK, I'll test you. Do you know who the President is?”
Abby released a short sharp sigh. “Yes, unfortunately. It's George Bush.”
“Father or son?”
“”You are a joker.”
Eyes glinting, Josie pressed on. She liked this game. “But are you aware your guinea pig is dead?”
“Josie!” Abby screamed. “Enough, enough. That was years ago! Of course I remember. I went to the funeral.” A brief image flashed in front of her: ten years old, sombrely carrying her adored pet in its cardboard box out to the back garden. Then the memory disappeared. She looked humorously at her elder sister. Was that what college was going to do to her too, she wondered; give a degree in needling people?
“But that movie,” Abby continued, about to reach for a third cookie. “It was so crass, so stupid.”
“And what do gymnasts do in their time off, read philosophy?”
“We don't have any time off.” Her hand stopped two inches away from the cookies. No more, she decided. She didn't want to put on weight. The fracture had happened a month ago and already she had noticed a subtle change in her body. Muscles had slackened, limbs had lost their sinewy look. That much she knew was inevitable.
All activity had not ceased; she was still working out and swimming. But she'd seen enough ex-gymnasts to know what perils could lie ahead if she dropped her guard. There'd been Kika, two years ahead of her at school, a champion gymnast just like herself. Off she went to college; she gave up gymnastics, partied like mad, and her lean lithe body immediately turned to blubber.
No-one, in Abby's experience, had fattened up so quickly, or looked so unhappy with her body, afraid of meeting people's eyes. She had pitied her, and taken a vow that whatever lay ahead for herself, the future was definitely not going to hold a blob of a waist, thick round arms, and a double chin.
Even so, she had to admit that being able to eat normally was a great compensation for giving up the sport she loved. For most of her childhood and adolescence she'd been faced with plates where food only occupied a quarter of the available space. That was her food in the corner over there. Tiny portions of meat and vegetables -- you needed a telescope to see them. And no rich smothering sauces, or desserts. No noisy get-togethers at Burger King and their kin, except perhaps on someone's birthday, and then no ketchup and French fries. Every day she had weighed herself; it was part of the routine. Every day it had to read 102 lbs. And every day it did.
Until now. When she stood on the scales and found she weighed 106, it didn't cause any worries. No need to go on a calorie watch, eating beans and lettuce. Her body, she reasoned, just had a little catching up to do. It was certainly being active. Her monthly period had just arrived with the menstrual equivalent of a trumpet fanfare; most months, before, it had barely whispered or failed to visit her at all.
And something, she knew, was happening with her breasts. They had never amounted to anything previously: a little puffiness around the nipples, but nothing you could fit into a bra. When she'd worn training bras for gymnastics -- the smallest available -- there'd been room in the cups to place small fruit or several of her friends' cell phones.
She'd always wanted enough breasts to fit an A cup: better that, she reasoned, than the androgynous stick shape gymnastics had given her. After all, she was a woman. Now she had noticed more puffiness than before. And her nipples always seemed sore. Something was on the move, surely.
“Next time I'm here,” Josie continued, “I'll see if I can find a movie that fits your high intellectual aspirations. Something with Adam Sandler in it. Would that be OK?”
Abby chuckled. Josie got up from the table with a look that said “Discussion terminated,” and then chuckled herself. “We had a good time, didn't we?”
“We did, yes. Good night, sis.”
Josie leaned over, kissed her lightly on the forehead, brushed a hand against one of her hips, and went her way.
That was another thing. Abby's hips. The straight lines gymnastics had sculpted her into weren't quite so straight any more. Now she was developing the beginnings of curves, with the hips rounding out to match her apprentice breasts. Bit by bit she was edging outwards. She was even getting a little taller, a late spurt of growth that bemused and amused everyone. Five foot two in September, by November she was five foot three, and had brought her first A cup bra, 32A. Womanhood beckoned. She was pleased, and excited.
But what could fill the hole in her life where gymnastics had been? Wanting to concentrate more on her studies, she found her mind wandering in class, away from the Civil War history, the useless algebra and physics, even “The Catcher in the Rye.” Geared for so long to using her strengths for physical trials, the mental exercises came hard.
As Mr Adomian droned on at the front about Archimedes' Principle, Abby's eyes would roam the classroom, taking in the figures of girls far more physically advanced than hers -- girls who had definite cleavage, who teased their hair into peekaboo cascades, and did everything to advertise their sex except mount it on a billboard. Half of Abby envied them their sexual parade, and wondered if she'd be able to join in. The other half thought them frivolous and ridiculous. “There must be more to life than having a sexy body”, that other half muttered. “Mustn't there?”
And yet when she found the eyes of boys in class lingering over her physique she liked it. When boys asked her out on a date, she liked that too. They went to movies, though Abby was picky. Nothing with Adam Sandler in it. “American Pie 3”? Not a chance.
Actually Abby preferred going out to eat. Most items on restaurant menus had been forbidden for so long; now, with the help of her parents' generous allowance, she took delight in sampling, trying different cuisines, from low-grade American to highbrow Japanese. She was still watching what she ate, and how much she ate. But she ate. And each time she stood on the scales, the number moved a little higher. 107 pounds. 108. 110. She didn't mind. She was still slim. She wasn't Kika.
Thanksgiving came round. “For the first time I'll be able to enjoy it without feeling guilty!” Abby told her mom as the kitchen filled with pots, pans, and delicious smells.
“That's good!” Her mom patted her on the head. “I'm really sorry you had to give up gymnastics, but at least being able to eat is compensation. Want a little nibble beforehand?”
“No thanks,” she said, “I'm trying to watch my figure”. She'd heard the phrase on others' lips, on TV too, and it just entered her head. Coming from her, though, it sounded odd. Abby Preston the slender gymnast: she actually had a figure?
Official confirmation came from the oracle, Josie, who swept into Abby's room like a tornado just as her sister was dressing.
“Abby, you have to see this!” She was waving the local paper in her face.
Abby peered in the general direction. “What's so special about a car dealer's ad?”
“Above it, above it! There's a school reunion photo. You know these people, don't you? Your gymnast friends. Look at --“ She was going to point out Kika, ungallantly captured by the camera, a sullen smile buried within a face as round as a balloon. But the torrent suddenly switched course as Josie caught sight of her sister from the back, naked except for her bra. “Jesus, Abby,” she yelled, “you've got a great ass!”
A shiver of excitement ran down Abby's spine. These were words no-one had said before; and they came from Josie, who'd once in a squabble called her body a blend of lamp-post and coat-hanger, worth no man's attention.
“Really?” Abby exclaimed, decibels rising. “Really?” She ran to the bathroom's full-length mirror, and peered at herself from the back and side. She was amazed. All these weeks she'd only noticed her growing breasts; now she realised that as she'd been eating, day by day her bottom had been secretly and steadily rounding out, becoming shapely and firm.
“I had no idea!” she said. Embarrassment was mixed with smiles.
“Little sister, I must offer you congratulations. You might be able to get a man yet.”
It was the start of a new era. She went to the mall and returned with a pair of tight-fitting jeans, specially chosen to show off her new rear end. The feeling of her body pushing against her clothes was completely new; she liked it. The look of herself in the mirror in profile, the swell of her breasts balanced neatly by her sweet derriere: she really liked that. Gymnastics had imprisoned her physically in an eternal childhood. But she was Peter Pan no longer.
By Christmas she had inched up a little more, to five foot five. T-shirts and slacks had that shrunken look; her 32A bra, too, was very pressed for space. Before Josie used to tease her that for all Abby knew her Christmas and birthday presents could have been hidden on top of the fridge, beyond her sightlines. Now, standing on her toes, she could see everything. It wasn't edifying. “There's just dust!” Abby said.
On New Year's Day she weighed herself. 114 pounds. She wasn't bothered. The extra pounds weren't made up of fat, she reasoned; but of extra bone tissue, and of gentle curves that seemed to excite every boy in the school.
Especially Hunter. “Could I carry your library books for you?” he said once at the end of school, trying to make it sound like a secret invitation to sex. From the corner of her eye, Abby saw the painting of the school's benefactor, Sonja Henie, innocent and smiling, horribly healthy, hanging on the corridor wall.
“I don't have any library books. So no, you can't,” Abby said with a toss of the head. She was getting tired of Hunter's attentions.
“It's only something you say. Opens the pathway to the first date.” Smug little brute, Hunter. His hair was parted in the middle.
“You're pushing your luck, aren't you?” Abby quickened her steps, away from her locker, down the corridor.
But Hunter was still leering alongside. “Well, let me carry something else. Can I carry your boobs?” And his hands suddenly pushed against them, squeezing them, testing their weight and circumference. Abby recoiled, yelled something quite unprintable, and slapped his face hard. It was over in a few seconds, except for the sound of Hunter addressing a few final words to Abby's departing back. “You've really got great tits!” he yelled.
She didn't need them pointing out. She knew they were noticeable, sitting firm and round on a body still fairly small despite the new curves. With each month that passed they seemed to fill out a little more, stretching the limits of her shirts, outgrowing the cups of her brassieres. Early in the new year, A cups had been replaced by B cups. As Easter loomed, it was clear Cs wouldn't be far behind.
Abby found this scary and exciting at the same time. She was getting a woman's body; that was exciting. And for all the Hunters touching parts she wanted to keep by invitation only it was still flattering to be thought of as desirable. And yet, and yet: to have a body that seemed out of her control -- that was the scary part. Her breasts were going their own way, and there seemed nothing she could do to stop them. As the weather heated up in the spring, so did her breasts. They sweated. When she ran up and downstairs they swayed. And always, at the back of her mind, she kept remembering Kika, the gymnast turned blob.
Yet all in all, Abby was thrilled. She had entered adulthood. And she was a virgin no more: Dean, her best male friend, had led her toward the promised land after a movie, when his parents were out. For a while, when her mother saw her about to leave for a date, curves squeezed into a low-cut dress, a warning hand would appear on Abby's shoulder.
“I have only one thing to say to you,” her mother would say -- “protection?” And Abby would pat her little bag with a smile. “So you're all set?” “Yep!” she'd reply, and waltz into the neon night.
From her high school classmates she could now take her pick. Alongside Dean, she picked Corey, she picked Dave, she picked Rusty, she picked Kent. But most of all she picked Greg, the basketball player, and when they decided they'd become boyfriend and girlfriend the other hopefuls fell away. Every weekends and sometimes inbetween they'd be in the dark at a movie, or a corner of a bar, warming up for the trip to paradise -- her bed or his, it didn't matter.
Greg preferred a movie as the warm-up act. Abby preferred restaurants. She loved eating, and she'd quickly tumbled to the connection between enjoying a full meal and finding her curves as she dressed or showered just a little more accentuated. Eating more had given her -- what was Dean's description, a “spectacular body”? So what, please, was wrong with that?
A huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders, and she gambolled through menus like a spring lamb exploring a new world. She especially relished the desserts and instinctively plumped for those highest in calories: the chocolate cake slabs, the ice cream concoctions in fluted glasses that rose up twelve inches and beyond. Slipping the food between her lips, dissolving it in her mouth, feeling her tummy filling up with calories as one course followed another: with Greg beside her these became almost sexual pleasures.
By the early summer, the scales read 122 pounds. Everything about her was getting bigger, her clothes as well as her body. In her gymnast days, she mostly took a size 2 in jeans; now she needed a 4 or 6. And her breasts had outstripped everything. She couldn't believe she now needed a D cup, but she did. Yet she didn't flinch: eating was making her more voluptuous, not fat. And it was getting her more and more attention.
Every young man in town it seemed was opening doors for her, getting drinks for her, inviting her to parties. At the high school Prom -- her date was Greg, who thought himself the luckiest man on the planet -- she was the girl every man adored: beautiful, shapely, a vision of heaven in a new red dress picked to accentuate her cleavage.
“My, my,” Josie had said, “is this my beanpole sister?” And Abby had beamed, wiggled her body, and crowned herself queen of the ball. By now her gymnastics friends had edged away from her. What was there now to talk about with Abby?
As summer advanced and term ended, clouds appeared in Abby's paradise. For males she'd become the biggest attraction at school. But what would follow at college? She'd be among crowds of new people, no longer a big fish in a little pond. And the back of her mind kept telling her that looks and a great physique weren't everything. She couldn't make a career out of being a party animal and wearing D cup bras. Not a distinguished career, at least. There must be something more to life.
There must be something more to Greg, too. At least she hoped so. Over the hot nights and days, inbetween sex, she began looking for more evidence of a brain, or at least a more interesting personality than she'd previously found. Was she just a sex machine to him? And if he hadn't been so handsome, in a Brad Pitt kind of way, would she be interested to him? Was anything going on above his shoulders?
Doubts of every kind began to worm their way in, and the business of choosing how to spend their evenings became more and more fraught. Beginning with the cuisine.
“You're very hard to please,” Greg groaned one night after Abby had dismissed about every restaurant in town.
“We can't keep going to the same places. I'm getting bored.”
A light suddenly shone in Greg's forehead. “I just remembered! Someone told me about a new tapas bar. How about that?”
Abby immediately took umbrage. “I'm not taking my clothes off in public. You've really got my tits on the brain, haven't you?”
The light dimmed. Greg blinked, uncomprehending. “What's that got to do with Mexican food?”
“What's Mexican food got to do with going topless? I'm not doing it, Greg. People ogling, watching them swing around. Do you want me to get a reputation as a loose woman?”
The light came back on. “Tapas, Abby. I said tapas T-a-p-a-s.”
“Oh.” She simmered down into a resigned sigh.
“How about fish? We could go to Davy Jones' Locker Room at the mall. Someone said they do great swordfish.”
Abby winced. “I don't like swordfish,” she said. “It doesn't taste of anything. Let's go Italian.”
Over to Cafe Vesuvius, then, for at least the tenth time, and another plate of Pasta Primavera with garlic bread. Her breasts were pressing tight against her top -- usually a source of pleasure, but now she felt uncomfortable. Between bites she tried to probe their future. “Greg, where are we going?”
“To my bedroom.”
“No, no, I mean what are we going to be, and do? I was always going to be a gymnast, but my ankle gave out, and now what? I don't know how I see myself. I don't study much. I go out at nights. That's not a career in embryo. And you, Greg, who are you?”
He was a man shovelling spaghetti into his mouth; it was not a good time to ask. Once his mouth became free he looked quizzical: when Abby turned serious he never knew what to say. “I'm a lucky boy with a sexy girlfriend,” he grinned.
“Yes, and?”
“And -- can we have sex please?”
Abby was exasperated, but gave in. She nodded. And then added: “But not before dessert.”
ABBY PULLS THROUGH
by Swordfish
by Swordfish
As soon as she landed on the floor after vaulting she knew something was wrong. Seriously wrong. Her right foot was yelping with pain. There was nothing she could do to stop herself crumpling up onto the ground, rubbing the ankle where the pain was centred.
“Abby, Abby, are you alright?” The voices of the gymnastic coach and others in the athletics studio clustered around her. Hands reached out.
“I think so. I just landed badly.” I hope so, that's what she meant.
“Don't try to get up,” coach Ed said. “This could be serious.”
She didn't need reminding. Her ankles, she knew, were her weak point: in the ten years that she'd been training seriously as a gymnast she'd needed operations on both of them to bind fractured bones. And here she was, back on the floor, damaged again, pain shooting out.
She was 18, just beginning her senior year at Sonja Henie High, adulthood stretching ahead. A gymnastics scholarship at college, maybe; further years of training and competing, enjoying the sport that had been her whole life, more or less, ever since she was taken to gymnastics classes as a five year-old kid, tumbling around, grinning prettily through a blaze of brown hair. And now what?
She was taken to hospital. X-rays were taken. Delicate fingers felt around. The injury's bark, she was eventually told, was worse than its bite. It was a hair fracture. Time and rest would heal it. But was it wise to keep putting her ankles at risk? What did she want, a lifetime of hobbling?
“Think about this seriously, Abby,” her father said, back from whatever he did at the office, as they talked in Fellowship, Pennsylvania, where Sonja Henie, Norwegian Olympics skater and movie star of the 1930s, had once stayed over during an exhibition tour to have her skates mended. “I know gymnastics has been your life, but --." Her mother said the same thing.
Abby thought of the thrill of winning prizes, achieving a goal, fulfilling potential. Gymnastics had ruled every aspect of her existence: the hours of training, first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon; the absence of any fun time with family and school friends; and always the strict dieting, essential to keep her body steady at 102 lbs, lean, muscular and tiny, a 26-inch waist, breasts scarcely begun. A strong and beautiful fighting machine. For several nights she squirreled herself away in her room, sometimes staring at the ceiling, other times focussing on the trophies, photographs and pennants scattered on shelves and walls.
Then one day she came down to breakfast, exhausted and gray. Mother stood at the coffee percolator; her father sat with the business section; elder sister Josie, not yet flown the nest and currently working in a canine beauty shop, was inspecting her nails. They looked up, expectant.
“I've made a decision,” Abby said, the voice slow, the tone grave. Before she said another word she burst into tears.
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“If giving up gymnastics means sitting in a shoebox and watching crappy movies like that, then I may have to have a re-think. That was truly awful!” They had just seen “Not Another Teen Movie.”
“Well, my dear,” said Josie, in her usual loud spirits, “that's what movies are like now.”
Back from their jaunt to the multiplex, the sisters were seated around the kitchen table, enjoying late-night milk and cookies. “They're not like “Bambi” any more,” she pressed on. “You're probably surprised movies talk.”
“Come on, I haven't been a hermit. I know I've been preoccupied with sports,” Abby said, reaching for her second chocolate cookie, “but you talk as though I've just returned from another planet.”
Josie was being exasperating, yet she didn't really mind; when had she had the time before to play at family jousting?
“OK, I'll test you. Do you know who the President is?”
Abby released a short sharp sigh. “Yes, unfortunately. It's George Bush.”
“Father or son?”
“”You are a joker.”
Eyes glinting, Josie pressed on. She liked this game. “But are you aware your guinea pig is dead?”
“Josie!” Abby screamed. “Enough, enough. That was years ago! Of course I remember. I went to the funeral.” A brief image flashed in front of her: ten years old, sombrely carrying her adored pet in its cardboard box out to the back garden. Then the memory disappeared. She looked humorously at her elder sister. Was that what college was going to do to her too, she wondered; give a degree in needling people?
“But that movie,” Abby continued, about to reach for a third cookie. “It was so crass, so stupid.”
“And what do gymnasts do in their time off, read philosophy?”
“We don't have any time off.” Her hand stopped two inches away from the cookies. No more, she decided. She didn't want to put on weight. The fracture had happened a month ago and already she had noticed a subtle change in her body. Muscles had slackened, limbs had lost their sinewy look. That much she knew was inevitable.
All activity had not ceased; she was still working out and swimming. But she'd seen enough ex-gymnasts to know what perils could lie ahead if she dropped her guard. There'd been Kika, two years ahead of her at school, a champion gymnast just like herself. Off she went to college; she gave up gymnastics, partied like mad, and her lean lithe body immediately turned to blubber.
No-one, in Abby's experience, had fattened up so quickly, or looked so unhappy with her body, afraid of meeting people's eyes. She had pitied her, and taken a vow that whatever lay ahead for herself, the future was definitely not going to hold a blob of a waist, thick round arms, and a double chin.
Even so, she had to admit that being able to eat normally was a great compensation for giving up the sport she loved. For most of her childhood and adolescence she'd been faced with plates where food only occupied a quarter of the available space. That was her food in the corner over there. Tiny portions of meat and vegetables -- you needed a telescope to see them. And no rich smothering sauces, or desserts. No noisy get-togethers at Burger King and their kin, except perhaps on someone's birthday, and then no ketchup and French fries. Every day she had weighed herself; it was part of the routine. Every day it had to read 102 lbs. And every day it did.
Until now. When she stood on the scales and found she weighed 106, it didn't cause any worries. No need to go on a calorie watch, eating beans and lettuce. Her body, she reasoned, just had a little catching up to do. It was certainly being active. Her monthly period had just arrived with the menstrual equivalent of a trumpet fanfare; most months, before, it had barely whispered or failed to visit her at all.
And something, she knew, was happening with her breasts. They had never amounted to anything previously: a little puffiness around the nipples, but nothing you could fit into a bra. When she'd worn training bras for gymnastics -- the smallest available -- there'd been room in the cups to place small fruit or several of her friends' cell phones.
She'd always wanted enough breasts to fit an A cup: better that, she reasoned, than the androgynous stick shape gymnastics had given her. After all, she was a woman. Now she had noticed more puffiness than before. And her nipples always seemed sore. Something was on the move, surely.
“Next time I'm here,” Josie continued, “I'll see if I can find a movie that fits your high intellectual aspirations. Something with Adam Sandler in it. Would that be OK?”
Abby chuckled. Josie got up from the table with a look that said “Discussion terminated,” and then chuckled herself. “We had a good time, didn't we?”
“We did, yes. Good night, sis.”
Josie leaned over, kissed her lightly on the forehead, brushed a hand against one of her hips, and went her way.
That was another thing. Abby's hips. The straight lines gymnastics had sculpted her into weren't quite so straight any more. Now she was developing the beginnings of curves, with the hips rounding out to match her apprentice breasts. Bit by bit she was edging outwards. She was even getting a little taller, a late spurt of growth that bemused and amused everyone. Five foot two in September, by November she was five foot three, and had brought her first A cup bra, 32A. Womanhood beckoned. She was pleased, and excited.
But what could fill the hole in her life where gymnastics had been? Wanting to concentrate more on her studies, she found her mind wandering in class, away from the Civil War history, the useless algebra and physics, even “The Catcher in the Rye.” Geared for so long to using her strengths for physical trials, the mental exercises came hard.
As Mr Adomian droned on at the front about Archimedes' Principle, Abby's eyes would roam the classroom, taking in the figures of girls far more physically advanced than hers -- girls who had definite cleavage, who teased their hair into peekaboo cascades, and did everything to advertise their sex except mount it on a billboard. Half of Abby envied them their sexual parade, and wondered if she'd be able to join in. The other half thought them frivolous and ridiculous. “There must be more to life than having a sexy body”, that other half muttered. “Mustn't there?”
And yet when she found the eyes of boys in class lingering over her physique she liked it. When boys asked her out on a date, she liked that too. They went to movies, though Abby was picky. Nothing with Adam Sandler in it. “American Pie 3”? Not a chance.
Actually Abby preferred going out to eat. Most items on restaurant menus had been forbidden for so long; now, with the help of her parents' generous allowance, she took delight in sampling, trying different cuisines, from low-grade American to highbrow Japanese. She was still watching what she ate, and how much she ate. But she ate. And each time she stood on the scales, the number moved a little higher. 107 pounds. 108. 110. She didn't mind. She was still slim. She wasn't Kika.
Thanksgiving came round. “For the first time I'll be able to enjoy it without feeling guilty!” Abby told her mom as the kitchen filled with pots, pans, and delicious smells.
“That's good!” Her mom patted her on the head. “I'm really sorry you had to give up gymnastics, but at least being able to eat is compensation. Want a little nibble beforehand?”
“No thanks,” she said, “I'm trying to watch my figure”. She'd heard the phrase on others' lips, on TV too, and it just entered her head. Coming from her, though, it sounded odd. Abby Preston the slender gymnast: she actually had a figure?
Official confirmation came from the oracle, Josie, who swept into Abby's room like a tornado just as her sister was dressing.
“Abby, you have to see this!” She was waving the local paper in her face.
Abby peered in the general direction. “What's so special about a car dealer's ad?”
“Above it, above it! There's a school reunion photo. You know these people, don't you? Your gymnast friends. Look at --“ She was going to point out Kika, ungallantly captured by the camera, a sullen smile buried within a face as round as a balloon. But the torrent suddenly switched course as Josie caught sight of her sister from the back, naked except for her bra. “Jesus, Abby,” she yelled, “you've got a great ass!”
A shiver of excitement ran down Abby's spine. These were words no-one had said before; and they came from Josie, who'd once in a squabble called her body a blend of lamp-post and coat-hanger, worth no man's attention.
“Really?” Abby exclaimed, decibels rising. “Really?” She ran to the bathroom's full-length mirror, and peered at herself from the back and side. She was amazed. All these weeks she'd only noticed her growing breasts; now she realised that as she'd been eating, day by day her bottom had been secretly and steadily rounding out, becoming shapely and firm.
“I had no idea!” she said. Embarrassment was mixed with smiles.
“Little sister, I must offer you congratulations. You might be able to get a man yet.”
It was the start of a new era. She went to the mall and returned with a pair of tight-fitting jeans, specially chosen to show off her new rear end. The feeling of her body pushing against her clothes was completely new; she liked it. The look of herself in the mirror in profile, the swell of her breasts balanced neatly by her sweet derriere: she really liked that. Gymnastics had imprisoned her physically in an eternal childhood. But she was Peter Pan no longer.
By Christmas she had inched up a little more, to five foot five. T-shirts and slacks had that shrunken look; her 32A bra, too, was very pressed for space. Before Josie used to tease her that for all Abby knew her Christmas and birthday presents could have been hidden on top of the fridge, beyond her sightlines. Now, standing on her toes, she could see everything. It wasn't edifying. “There's just dust!” Abby said.
On New Year's Day she weighed herself. 114 pounds. She wasn't bothered. The extra pounds weren't made up of fat, she reasoned; but of extra bone tissue, and of gentle curves that seemed to excite every boy in the school.
Especially Hunter. “Could I carry your library books for you?” he said once at the end of school, trying to make it sound like a secret invitation to sex. From the corner of her eye, Abby saw the painting of the school's benefactor, Sonja Henie, innocent and smiling, horribly healthy, hanging on the corridor wall.
“I don't have any library books. So no, you can't,” Abby said with a toss of the head. She was getting tired of Hunter's attentions.
“It's only something you say. Opens the pathway to the first date.” Smug little brute, Hunter. His hair was parted in the middle.
“You're pushing your luck, aren't you?” Abby quickened her steps, away from her locker, down the corridor.
But Hunter was still leering alongside. “Well, let me carry something else. Can I carry your boobs?” And his hands suddenly pushed against them, squeezing them, testing their weight and circumference. Abby recoiled, yelled something quite unprintable, and slapped his face hard. It was over in a few seconds, except for the sound of Hunter addressing a few final words to Abby's departing back. “You've really got great tits!” he yelled.
She didn't need them pointing out. She knew they were noticeable, sitting firm and round on a body still fairly small despite the new curves. With each month that passed they seemed to fill out a little more, stretching the limits of her shirts, outgrowing the cups of her brassieres. Early in the new year, A cups had been replaced by B cups. As Easter loomed, it was clear Cs wouldn't be far behind.
Abby found this scary and exciting at the same time. She was getting a woman's body; that was exciting. And for all the Hunters touching parts she wanted to keep by invitation only it was still flattering to be thought of as desirable. And yet, and yet: to have a body that seemed out of her control -- that was the scary part. Her breasts were going their own way, and there seemed nothing she could do to stop them. As the weather heated up in the spring, so did her breasts. They sweated. When she ran up and downstairs they swayed. And always, at the back of her mind, she kept remembering Kika, the gymnast turned blob.
Yet all in all, Abby was thrilled. She had entered adulthood. And she was a virgin no more: Dean, her best male friend, had led her toward the promised land after a movie, when his parents were out. For a while, when her mother saw her about to leave for a date, curves squeezed into a low-cut dress, a warning hand would appear on Abby's shoulder.
“I have only one thing to say to you,” her mother would say -- “protection?” And Abby would pat her little bag with a smile. “So you're all set?” “Yep!” she'd reply, and waltz into the neon night.
From her high school classmates she could now take her pick. Alongside Dean, she picked Corey, she picked Dave, she picked Rusty, she picked Kent. But most of all she picked Greg, the basketball player, and when they decided they'd become boyfriend and girlfriend the other hopefuls fell away. Every weekends and sometimes inbetween they'd be in the dark at a movie, or a corner of a bar, warming up for the trip to paradise -- her bed or his, it didn't matter.
Greg preferred a movie as the warm-up act. Abby preferred restaurants. She loved eating, and she'd quickly tumbled to the connection between enjoying a full meal and finding her curves as she dressed or showered just a little more accentuated. Eating more had given her -- what was Dean's description, a “spectacular body”? So what, please, was wrong with that?
A huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders, and she gambolled through menus like a spring lamb exploring a new world. She especially relished the desserts and instinctively plumped for those highest in calories: the chocolate cake slabs, the ice cream concoctions in fluted glasses that rose up twelve inches and beyond. Slipping the food between her lips, dissolving it in her mouth, feeling her tummy filling up with calories as one course followed another: with Greg beside her these became almost sexual pleasures.
By the early summer, the scales read 122 pounds. Everything about her was getting bigger, her clothes as well as her body. In her gymnast days, she mostly took a size 2 in jeans; now she needed a 4 or 6. And her breasts had outstripped everything. She couldn't believe she now needed a D cup, but she did. Yet she didn't flinch: eating was making her more voluptuous, not fat. And it was getting her more and more attention.
Every young man in town it seemed was opening doors for her, getting drinks for her, inviting her to parties. At the high school Prom -- her date was Greg, who thought himself the luckiest man on the planet -- she was the girl every man adored: beautiful, shapely, a vision of heaven in a new red dress picked to accentuate her cleavage.
“My, my,” Josie had said, “is this my beanpole sister?” And Abby had beamed, wiggled her body, and crowned herself queen of the ball. By now her gymnastics friends had edged away from her. What was there now to talk about with Abby?
As summer advanced and term ended, clouds appeared in Abby's paradise. For males she'd become the biggest attraction at school. But what would follow at college? She'd be among crowds of new people, no longer a big fish in a little pond. And the back of her mind kept telling her that looks and a great physique weren't everything. She couldn't make a career out of being a party animal and wearing D cup bras. Not a distinguished career, at least. There must be something more to life.
There must be something more to Greg, too. At least she hoped so. Over the hot nights and days, inbetween sex, she began looking for more evidence of a brain, or at least a more interesting personality than she'd previously found. Was she just a sex machine to him? And if he hadn't been so handsome, in a Brad Pitt kind of way, would she be interested to him? Was anything going on above his shoulders?
Doubts of every kind began to worm their way in, and the business of choosing how to spend their evenings became more and more fraught. Beginning with the cuisine.
“You're very hard to please,” Greg groaned one night after Abby had dismissed about every restaurant in town.
“We can't keep going to the same places. I'm getting bored.”
A light suddenly shone in Greg's forehead. “I just remembered! Someone told me about a new tapas bar. How about that?”
Abby immediately took umbrage. “I'm not taking my clothes off in public. You've really got my tits on the brain, haven't you?”
The light dimmed. Greg blinked, uncomprehending. “What's that got to do with Mexican food?”
“What's Mexican food got to do with going topless? I'm not doing it, Greg. People ogling, watching them swing around. Do you want me to get a reputation as a loose woman?”
The light came back on. “Tapas, Abby. I said tapas T-a-p-a-s.”
“Oh.” She simmered down into a resigned sigh.
“How about fish? We could go to Davy Jones' Locker Room at the mall. Someone said they do great swordfish.”
Abby winced. “I don't like swordfish,” she said. “It doesn't taste of anything. Let's go Italian.”
Over to Cafe Vesuvius, then, for at least the tenth time, and another plate of Pasta Primavera with garlic bread. Her breasts were pressing tight against her top -- usually a source of pleasure, but now she felt uncomfortable. Between bites she tried to probe their future. “Greg, where are we going?”
“To my bedroom.”
“No, no, I mean what are we going to be, and do? I was always going to be a gymnast, but my ankle gave out, and now what? I don't know how I see myself. I don't study much. I go out at nights. That's not a career in embryo. And you, Greg, who are you?”
He was a man shovelling spaghetti into his mouth; it was not a good time to ask. Once his mouth became free he looked quizzical: when Abby turned serious he never knew what to say. “I'm a lucky boy with a sexy girlfriend,” he grinned.
“Yes, and?”
“And -- can we have sex please?”
Abby was exasperated, but gave in. She nodded. And then added: “But not before dessert.”
